Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the state of the
art in archiving NMR and MRI data. I thought I had found it when I
installed Pinnacle Micro Apex 4.6 GB MO drives on each of the SGI
workstations in our laboratory. These drives are comparable in speed to
conventional magnetic disk drives and use highly durable, relatively
inexpensive (ca. $90 per disk), removable media. They store about 2 GB on
each side after formatting and it is possible to directly acquire data from
the spectrometer to them, even over the network via NFS. While the media
have proven durable as advertised, the drives themselves have failed
repeatedly. Further, the lack of adequate support for these drives under
the Irix 5.3 and 6.3 operating systems has led to much user confusion,
several corrupted disks, and a lot of frustration on my part. Worse still,
Pinnacle Micro is evidently on the verge of going out of business!
I'm aware of the benefits of archiving to writable CD's, but I
would like to retain the convenience of a read/write, random access medium.
Also, I like the peace of mind that comes with using optical media in a lab
with two very large magnets. Does anyone out there know of an alternative
(non-Pinnacle Micro) magneto-optical or purely optical storage system with
good capacity and proven reliability on Silicon Graphics computers? I would
be especially interested to hear about any third party drives which can
read our existing 4.6 GB MO platters.
Thank you for your assistance,
Ken Fishbein
Facility Manager, NMR Unit
NIH/NIA/GRC
Ph. (410) 558-8512
FAX (410) 558-8323 or 8173
E-mail: fishbein@vax.grc.nia.nih.gov
Address: Ken Fishbein
NIH/NIA/GRC
5600 Nathan Shock Drive
Baltimore, MD 21224 USA