snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy T. Beagle) (11/01/88)
In article <17488@gatech.edu> ken@gatech.UUCP (Ken Seefried iii) writes: | Perhaps, perhaps not. Remeber, an optical disk is not subject to | head crashes and other magnetic disk problems, so you don't have | to worry about the power going out and thrashing your data. That | is not to say that I won't buy a second drive, but it will be for | speed, not data reliability... I've been waiting for someone else to pounce on this, but noone has, so I guess it is up to me. [note newsgroups and followup lines, I changed 'em] The magnetic/optical drive used in NeXT *may* be (and hopefully is) *less* prone to disaster than conventional magnetic drives, but don't get overconfidant and assume that utopia has arrived. Yank the power cord on your typical unix box while it is busy doing something and see if fsck is happy when you bring it back up. It may very well not be, and that has nothing to do with the technology used in the mass storage device. Also, as long as it is a r/w device, and not read-only, a bug in the software (or disk controller, or...) can easily wipe out your files. Or operator error. (E.g. the classic rm * problem for those who haven't aliased rm yet) Even read-only media can go bad. Talk to rec.video about "laser rot". Plus, this is *new* technology. How far do you want to trust it right away? In short, backup will still be necessary, for a number of reasons. Having said all that, I think these drives sound really spiffo. I want one. With a SCSI interface. Now. Just the thing for playing with GNU software. Better for backups, too, with a cost of ~$0.20/MB vs. ~$0.30-0.50/MB for DC600A tapes, and with pseudo-random access. Now, could someone just fix the shift key on Steve's keyboard so it doesn't randomly come on in the middle of corporate names? "NeXT" is a drag to type. _____ /_____\ Snoopy (a UPS wouldn't hurt either) /_______\ |___| tektronix!tekecs!sopwith!snoopy |___| sun!nosun!illian!sopwith!snoopy