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5. Optical Jukeboxes

I have no experience with optical jukeboxes with Linux!!!! I have had experiences with Optical Jukeboxes under HP-UX. In this setup the the Jukebox had a SCSI address of it's own. Each slot in the Jukebox had an associated LUN number. A device name was assigned for each disk slot A side and B side. The mount command was run against the appropriate device name. I had a Jukebox with just one drive and 16 optical disk slots - 20 Gig. I thought it was going to be a real hassle to write a disk mount manager to share this drive among users until I discovered you can mount as many disk as you want and the Jukebox driver takes care of arbitration - what a nice feature. Granted, you only want archive type data here and your overall system configuration to be such that not too many processes will be accessing the Jukebox at the same time. The disk spin down, carriage load, carriage move, carriage unload, carriage move to the next disk, carriage next disk load, carriage move, optical drive load, and spin up takes about 12 seconds - "seek-from-hell".


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