There are many approaches to managing the jukebox. Something like a Hierarchical Storage Manager can make many CDs look like one big partition. However, as each high-density CD holds about 650 Mb per side, and UNIX generally allows a partition to have a maximum size of 2 Gb, it only takes 3 CD sides to make a maximum sized partition. To store video and audio requires partitions of hundreds of gigabytes.
Current jukebox hardware and software supports a range of the features required. However, because some of the other features are not suitable, it may be desirable to write a new jukebox manager. In particular, most jukebox software makes the jukebox look like a collection of NFS discs, with each disc having a UNIX file system. For video archiving a different model is required. There will be far fewer files, but their size will be huge. are:
Jon CROWCROFT
1998-12-03