Reading through the recent summary from Jiejun Wu at UC-Irvine
on storage devices, I've decided to chime in with our recent
experiences. We have been in considerable flux very recently
on this issue, so what I say is somewhat preliminary (and why
I didn't post earlier). Even so, I felt the following might be
useful to the group in general.
We have recently installed the following devices:
1. a Zip drive on Windows-95 system,
2. a Zip drive on a Sun Sparcstation4 on a new mass spec instrument
3. a writable (Pinnacle) CD-ROM in our computer center
We have had for a while:
4. a removable Syquest drive on a Windows 3.11 system
5. a colorado system Jumbo QIC tape backup unit (Win 3.11)
6. 8mm DAT on Sun
7. 4mm DAT on SGI's
8. Pinnacle 600Mb magneto-optic drive on Sun
So, a summary of all this stuff. The Syquest drive has given me
a lot of hardware trouble (back to syquest for repairs twice in
two years), so not recommended. The Zip drives are new for us in
the facility but used widely within the department: looks like a
much better drive than the Syquest. A word of warning, though:
I was not able to interface the PC SCSI drive with an Adaptec SCSI
interface board. Finally gave up and purchased the IOmega SCSI
board and it works fine. The Zip on the Sparcstation works ok,
but so far we have not figured out how to mount the drive without
giving students root access; not a preferred situation. I have
never liked DAT drives on UNIX boxes for student use because of
the software. The Colorado Jumbo has much better software, and
I'm thinking of getting a Travan QIC system to augment it.
I very much (so far) like the following scheme, which I am
recommending to our students:
1. For smaller regular backups, use the PC Zip drive. All our
Bruker data (from AC's and AM's) automatically goes to a WinNT
server, so backups to the Zip drive is simple. For our Sun's,
I have installed WS_FTP32 (can get from www.shareware.com) on
the PC's that works great. We setup a connection for each Sun
in WS_FTP32; students just click on the Sun they need to get data
from, fill in their account info and they're connected. WS_FTP32
sends directory structures and preserves long filenames directly
to the Zip drive. So it's easy to backup and restore UNIX-based
data with the PC-based Zip drive.
2. For larger data sets, we use the Pinnacle magneto-optic drive
installed on a Sun Sparcstation for archival purposes. The
drive is very remote from the NMR facility, so stray fields are
not an issue. Pinnacle provides a utility that allows students
to mount their disks without having root access (formatting new
disks, however, does require root privilege). This drive is very
convenient since it holds 600 Mb. Once a disk is full, we FTP the
complete contents to a temp space on a WinNT workstation and write
a CD. The CD writer works fine (software is very easy to use),
but is slow and ties up the workstation for ~1h during the 600 Mb
write (we've been unsuccessful at getting reliable writes at 2x or
4x speeds).
So I currently do not recommend putting Zips on Suns (or SGI boxes)
because of the root access problem with mounting. If any of you
have solved this, I'd sure like to hear how. Zip's on our PC's
with good FTP software seem to work great; I would assume the
same is true with a Jazz drive. The FTP connection may be quite
a bit slower, however, than a direct connection to the UNIX box (we
get ~0.5Mb/s transfers via FTP, so for regular archiving this is
not a problem).
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Charlie Fry Tel: (608)262-3182
Director, MR Facility Fax: (608)262-0381
Chem. Dept., Univ. Wisconsin
Madison, WI 53706 USA email: fry@chem.wisc.edu
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