Advances in CD-based storage technologies
Advances in CD-based storage technologies
NewTech Distribution, manufacturers of the PowerROM range of CD/DVD data archive/access servers and jukeboxes, have announced the inclusion of major developments in CD and DVD file system standards.
The first breakthrough comes in the form of variable packet writing; the inclusion of this technology allows users to incrementally write data directly to CD/R, DVD/R and DVD/RW formats over the network, the same way you would to a hard disk.
The new format is called 'Universal Disk Format'(UDF).
UDF supporting devices such as CDROM, CD/R, DVD/R and DVD/RW allow for volume aggregation, meaning they can be combined and presented as a single unified file system - in other words, like one big endlessly expandable hard disk.
NTD's version 3.0 PowerROM software for Windows NT incorporates both variable packet writing and UDF support. This now gives the capability of presenting the full range of PowerROM towers, servers and read/write jukeboxes, in any combination, on the network as a single drive letter, completely transparent to the user. This breakthrough opens up low cost secure CD and DVD storage to many applications on the network. Traditional purchasers of expensive, robotic tape silos for large data archive now have a cheaper, faster alternative – attaching PowerROM Cygnet jukeboxes directly to NT servers. Under standard CD/R, this gives a maximum randomly searchable storage capacity of over 2.5 tera-
bytes presented as a single drive letter. Alternatively, if DVD/R is utilised as the storage platform, the secure randomly searchable read/write capacity can be over 15 terabytes.