Appeared in the Proc. Twelfth IEEE Symposium on Mass Storage Systems April 1993.

Re-Defining the Storage Hierarchy: An Ultra-Fast Magneto-Optical Disk Drive

Takashi Nakagomi, Mark Holzbach, Rodney Van Meter III and Sanjay Ranade

Abstract:

Over the last five years, Asaca Corp. has developed a multi-beam, magneto-optical disk drive with native 12.24 MByte/second transfer rate. Originally developed for video broadcasting, it is now being adapted for the computer mass data storage market. A SCSI-2 interface is currently being developed to attach the drive and its related autochanger to a high-performance computer as components of a network-attached, hierarchical file server (HFS) system. Storage capacities of 2.88 TB, and average aggregate (four drive system) I/O speeds of 32 MB/second are considered possible. Asaca's High-Speed Magneto-Optical (HSMO) technology enables a re-definition of the present storage hierarchy by allowing the use of optical disks to complement or, in some cases, replace high-performance magnetic tape. Many of the HSMO performance figures quoted in this paper are estimates which will be confirmed in the very near future when the SCSI-2 interface is completed.

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