I have used a 1.3 GByte Pinnacle Drive since 1994. We had hardware
problems with it when it was very close to the end of warranty (days short
of it, actually). Pinnacle fixed it as a warranty job and it has been fine
ever since. It is probably based on the same drive as the jukebox that
Kurt Wollenberg has. I obviously don't have to deal with the jukebox
software. I have many individual users with their own disks and experience
amazingly few problems. We mount it on a system with Irix 5.3 and NFS mount
it on both 5.3 and 6.3. There are a few minor details that make this work,
but no special software. I hope we continue to have good luck with it.
The message below makes me a little nervous.
Jane
At 05:43 AM 2/26/98 -0500, you wrote:
> Dear AMMRL members,
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
Dr. Jane Strouse
Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1569
(310)-825-9841 - voice
(310)-825-0393 - FAX
strousej@chem.ucla.edu