Here are the names of companies I know have MO drives and some I know have jukeboxes. In the past, I've heard something about high failure rates in MO drives in general, IF the cooling fans didn't have proper filtering. Dust particles would enter the drive and cause problems. (These last 2 sentences are VERY OLD information, I haven't hear anything new on this in a LONG time.) We purchased a Maxoptics Tahiti 4 drive and I think its great. The first enclosure we had didn't have nearly enough air movement and the MO drive and a DAT drive over heated. We replaced the enclosure with one with a lot of air flow and haven't had any problems with the drive since.
The Tahiti 3 drives used to be the best and under IRIX <=5.3, SGI already had some `unsupported' support for these drives. Get the one with the 4MB buffer NOT the 1MB. The Tahiti 4's have been out now for quite some time and get about 2.2GB/disc (~1.1GB/side). The Tahiti 6's (T6-5200) have also been out a long time and get about 4GB/disc (~2GB/side). SGI's need the 512 byte/sector media, ANY other byte/sector media will NOT work. IRIX 6.2 has some support for MO's. As long as one uses EFS file systems, IRIX will automatically mount MO media. HOWEVER, if one uses XFS, which is what we are all SUPPOSE to be changing to, mediad will not recognize the discs. Some companies will try to sell you software drivers for their drives, they should NOT be necessary. Make sure the company guarantees in writing that the drive will work with your machine. Also ask them for the name and number of some SGI customers. Good luck.
Under IRIX <= 5.3, cdromd (and mediad under IRIX 5.3) doesn't understand MO discs and under IRIX 6.2 mediad doesn't like XFS MO discs. In order to allow regular users to mount MO's with out root privilages, get the `mountmo' program to mount/unmount a MO disc from the command line or the `automopper' daemon to automount discs for you. The source code for both is in ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/hardware/mo/. We are using automopper and it works fine. I've made a few minor changes and created a makefile and system start up script for it. When I've got a chance, I'll try to get the changes back to author and also make it available here.
Under IRIX 6.5 mediad now supports XFS MO discs, so `mountmo' and `automopper' are no longer needed. `mediad' now automatically mounts XFS MO discs and `eject' will unmount and eject the media. We have had this working on an Indigo2 (with a T4) and an Octane (with a T6) for some time now.
Working CD-ROM Drive Poll ,
Tape Drives,
Hard Disks,
Joysticks,
Memory,
CDR's (Writeable CD-ROM's)If you have any additions, corrects, or updates to the above information, please email me at: blbates@vigyan.com, thanks.
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Last update: December 16, 2003