[comp.sys.sun] R/W/Erasable Mag-Optical disk interchange

sdm7g@Virginia.EDU (Steven D. Majewski) (01/16/91)

Can either (SUN) pcfs or mtools be used on a non-floppy medium:
specifically I want to be able to interchange erasable mag-optical disks
between PC's and SUN's. Has anyone done this ? 

Also: I know of at least one vendor (Alphatronics) that sells software to
read/write/translate optical disks between systems. (It doesn't work
symmetrically: I think if you want to write data on Sun & read on PC, you
have to format/partition disk on PC, move to Sun and write data with
translation software, and then read it on PC - native mode. - I may not
have the direction correct, but the spirit is more or less the same.) Does
anyone know of any similar products, or perhaps one in which ALL systems
write data in a common/neutral/foreign(to-all) file system.

  Any other comments on media/file exchange are invited.
  ( sdm7g@virginia.edu ) 
  I will summarize & post any e-mail replies.

seamans@seaimage.nlm.nih.gov (James R. Seamans) (01/22/91)

In article <1271@brchh104.bnr.ca> sdm7g@Virginia.EDU (Steven D. Majewski) writes:

>Can either (SUN) pcfs or mtools be used on a non-floppy medium:
>specifically I want to be able to interchange erasable mag-optical disks
>between PC's and SUN's. Has anyone done this ? 

We are currently investigating a company :

	Maximum Storage, Inc
	5025 Centennial Blvd.
	Colorado Springs, CO 80919
	(719) 531-6888

They have just completed development of a transparent or interchangeable
WORM disk between PC's and Sun systems.  I only have the features for the
PC model but should be the same for the Sun side.

Features:

	PC compatiable plug-and-play subsystem
	1003 mbyte formatted capacity
	28 msec effective access time   (what ever that means)
	DOS transparent operating software
	Data porability across a wide range of computing environments
	Transfer rate is 5.0 MBits/sec

	Government price is $3575 model APX-5000

In discussion with them, they state that the disk can be written on ether
system and read on the other. The Sun system is SCSI and comes with device
driver, with NFS capability.

	Government price is $6925 model APX-5320

	Double sided disks are $175.

Our application is for medical image capture on a PC based system and then
transferring them to a Sun for processing.  Our current image sizes are
for 1K to 8K square full color for a total of 225 Mbytes.  So we need alot
of space and this could fit the requirements.

James Seamans
National Library of Medicine
seamans@seaimage.nlm.nih.gov