stephen@bpa.bell-atl.com (Stephen C. Arnold) (04/11/90)
Here is a copy of my original posting on removeable erasable optical disk drives and all the corispondance I ahve recieved on the topic. I've removed some routing information and multiple copies of the original message. |My department is looking at Removable Optical Disk Drives for backup of a |Sun 4/280 (soon to be a 4/490 we hope) and a Vax 11/750. We want to hang |the drive off of the Sun. Any information on this will be helpful, |especially references from people using these systems. | |Our needs justify getting 1 5.25 in. disk drive. We will be providing the |SCSI port. In evaluating the system, I am looking a several things |including price, reliablity, recomendations of current users, ease of use, |financial stablity of the vender. | |If you have information, please mail it to me at | |stephen@temvax.UUCP (..!bpa!temvax!stephen) X-Subject: Optical disk drives X-From: dgc@math.ucla.edu I don't know about standalone optical disk drives, but have you thought about a stripped NeXT. These cost about $6,500 and come with, among other things, an optical drive that holds 233 MBytes per cartridge. They coexist, using NFS system and the Yellow Pages quite happily on an ether-net with Suns and Vaxen. The stripped sun keeps its OS on the Optical drive and has a 40 MByte hard disk for swapping. It is routine to move the OS to an existing hard drive and run over the ethernet. So for the money you get a very reliable optical disk plus a very nice computer about twice the speed of a Sun 3-260. X-Subject: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: jmberkey@watnow.waterloo.edu We have been trying out an optical drive from Symmetrical for the past couple of weeks, and we've found it disappointing. First of all the drive is advertised as 600Mb, but in the small print you discover that you have to take the disk out and flip it to get extra 300Mb. Useless, considering the price. Second, our SCSI bus suffers a lot when we're using it. I did a tar the morning we got it to transfer some files there and our load on a SparcServer 330 went up to ~3. There was a very noticeable decrease in performance. We're sending it back, getting a 720Mb hard drive (for less money) and sticking to our Exabyte. X-Subject: Re: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: Graham Underwood <dsinc!uunet!relay.EU.net!advsys!graham> Try calling Genesis Inc. who are located conveniently close to you in Valley Forge. Tel. 215-933-4848. They support a range of 12" and 5.25" WORM and erasable optical drives. X-Subject: Re: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: kpearson@cattell.psych.upenn.edu (Kathy Pearson) I have 2 Delta MicroSystems drives from Peripheral Devices Corporation. One is on a Sun 3/60 and the other is on a Sun 3/160. These came from Florida: Thomas J. Sununu 21301 Powerline Road Suite 309 Boca Raton, FL 33433 407-487-1880 FAX 407-487-5707 but there is a local vendor representing the same company: Woody Daeche Chester County Commons 14 Mystic Lane Malvern, PA 19355 215-640-0446 The drives that I have are WRITE ONCE READ MANY TIMES, and this is satisfactory for my data archives. However, you may want a drive for multiple writes for backing up. These guys may have that, too. I've been very happy with the drives I have. X-Subject: Re: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: mark@deltam.com (mark galbraith) We have a drive as you described. Contact us at 415-449-6881 for more information. X-Subject: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: Doug Meyer <oscarmir@Athena.EE.MsState.Edu> The only tidbit of information I can give you is about Pinnacle Micro. I've been doing a wee bit of investigation into Optical Media, and can share the following. Pinnacle Micro, Inc. Kim Mowry, Sales Coordinator 15265 Alton Parkway Irvine, CA 92718 1-800-553-7070 The have 650MB and 1.2GB systems w/512KB and 1024K sectored media. Read/Write cycle guarantee is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3M cycles if my memory serves me correctly. Talking with them, they claim to have thousands in the field and no disasters to report (not that anybody would ever talk openly about their disasters). They do have their systems installed on every variety of Sun Server and Workstation around, and so it seems that their "Personality Adapter Kits" are high quality. If you're just looking at onesie-twosie purchases, the list price is probably a good measure: 650MB drive for $4695; 1.2GB drive for $9300; Personality Kit for $995; Media for $250. They do have typical discount curves for volume purchases of 2-9 and >10. Also, they have an educational (university) discount program. Other stats are: 65MSec Average Seek (actually more like 50-55Msec on Suns) SCSI ANSI X3.131-1986 Host Interface Burst rate of 1.2 MB/sec. 10+ year Media storage life One year Limited Warranty We are considering trying to get one in here on a trial basis sometime in the not too distant future, but have not moved on it yet. I found Pinnacle to be very cooperative and responsive. We aren't really excited right now because magnetic media technology continues to outstrip magneto-optical technologies both in density and (most interestingly) in access speed. If you're only needing a backup media for a system, I'd recommend 8mm tape where the shoebox costs $4000-5000 and each tape costs about $8. But if you have other needs, like frequent and rapid random accessing of the backed-up data, etc., then perhaps optical is the preferred method. Have fun! X-Subject: Re: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: dsinc!uunet!killians.tuc.nrao.edu!pmurphy (Pat Murphy) I can't vouch for their products, but if you're just looking to find out "what's out there", you might start with Artecon. They sell an Erasable optical disk in 5.25" format, formatted capacity 594 MBytes (half of that on each side and yes, you have to flip it). Their number is 1-800-872-2783. Sorry, but I don't have any info on pricing. Just saw their product at a local Sun seminar. X-Subject: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: pbg@cs.brown.edu I'm looking into the same thing. There are several vendors selling them, but we haven' purchased one yet. Unfortunately all of them seem to require kernel patches to run with SunOS. Let me know if you need the names of vendors...(and I'd be interested in the replies you get...) X-Subject: Re: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: joeche@auto-trol.COM (Joe Chen) Delta Microsystems' MO drive is the best on the Sun. Ten X OCU + Sony 12" WORM is the nicest if you want to use WORM drive. X-Subject: Re: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: dsinc!riacs!rutgers!dell.dell.com!gbh (Geoff Hoese) Try calling Ten-X Technologies, in Austin, Tx., (512) 343-3567. They sell a device called the 'OCU' - optical conversion unit. It emulates a winchester - thus, you can plug it in to the Sun, and treat the WORM as a standard hard disk. I believe they also now sell subsystems, that is, the OCU with the worm, all hooked up and ready to go. Ask for Liz, tell her I sent you... It works with most available worm drives, and most SCSI hosts. X-Subject: Re: Removeable Optical Disk Drives? X-From: mike@cimcor.MN.ORG (Michael Grenier) We are using a Sun 4/60 with a Sony optical drive. We did have problems in that the Sun will not format (.i.e set the bad blocks) the drive. If you can do the format somewhere else, it will work fine.