joel@peora.UUCP (10/21/88)
If I interpreted the BIX article about the NeXT machine correctly,
they are saying that it takes 3 passes to write data to the optical
drive:
1. Erase the old data.
2. Write the new data.
3. Verify the data.
While this might not degrade performance too much if the disk caching
system isn't write through, it doesn't bode well if the system is doing
much paging or swapping.
I suspect that if a user does much paging, and doesn't want to buy the
high capacity drives that NeXT sells they would be well advised to get a
small fast SCSI drive, say 40 to 80 MB, to use as a paging area and /tmp.
--
Joel Upchurch/Concurrent Computer Corp/2486 Sand Lake Rd/Orlando, FL 32809
joel@peora.ccur.com {uiucuxc,hoptoad,petsd,ucf-cs}!peora!joel (407)850-1040