Peter.Stoehr%EMBL@PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU (Peter Stoehr) (08/10/90)
Rob Harper has asked me the following about EMBL CD-ROMs: >Hei Peter, > >I have just taken over the task of handling the tapes from EMBL >I do not know if CD-ROM would be a more elegant solution, but fill >me in on the advantages. >If you want to answer these questions in a public forum then >please do. > >RGDS Rob. > >1) price compared to tape? Academic (EMBL/EC nation) DM 150 Academic 300 Commercial 600 This includes both EMBL Nucleotide and SWISS-PROT sequence databases, also retrieval s/w for MS-DOS. Tapes cost half these prices, but only include single databases (and no s/w). >2) CD drive price The following are ball-park figures, obviously variable:- MS-DOS : DM 1500-1900 (Hitachi or Philips). MAC : DM 2000 VAX : DM 4000 (SCSI, eg for vaxstation 3100) DM 7000 (Q-Bus) SUN : DM 2000 (Sun SPARCstation 1, 4/60) >3) Software for getting database from CD drive to VAX. A sore point !. Currently there is no CD-ROM driver s/w that allows VMS to read ISO-formatted (or High Sierra) CD-ROM's. sigh.. A standalone program, CD_ACCESS, has been made available which allows 'dir', 'type' and 'copy' operations on ISO CD-ROM's. Thanks to Peter Stockwell, Otago, New Zealand, for this contribution. It is available from the EMBL File Server. >4) Speed of CD drive compared to Hard disk assuming I want to > look at data on a PC. CD-ROM is slower of course, but its high capacity gives scope for extensive indexing which can often overcome the slow access. We are very satisfied with the performance of the query/retrieval s/w (for MS-DOS) on our CD, for instance. As a further clue to whether the CD-ROM can be used a working medium, I include some rough figures from some FASTA homology searches. Database files used were located on the CD, and were in NBRF-format. The latest versions of FASTA for the MAC and MSDOS from Bill Pearson can read these. MAC IIcx, 220aa test sequence vs SWISSPROT 13 5 mins cpu IBM PC-AT ('real') 10 mins cpu MAC II cx, 907 bp test vs EMBL 21, Mammal div. 3 mins cpu EMBL 21, Complete 45 mins cpu Of course, there is always the option of copying files from CD-ROM to floppy/hard disk if you have space and need to work faster. Peter Stoehr EMBL Data Library