Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: nyteschayde on January 10, 2017, 11:41:22 PM
-
Wondering if anybody has successfully mounted a Bluray drive to the Amiga for data transfer purposes. I was looking at some USB based drives and curious if someone has tried this with their Spider/Subway/Other USB controllers and the usbscsi.device.
Specifically wondering if I burn my Amiga files to a 50GB or 100GB BluRay disc, will I be able to mount that disc on the Amiga and view the files directly.
Thoughts?
-
Not the way I would do it. Optical is not good for archives that you plan to access regularly, on a daily basis. Unless you keep the same disk in the drive all the time. Everytime you change the disk, it picks crud up on the surfaces.
Solid state drive much better idea, more reliable in long term. You still tie a bunch of Amiga resources up, keeping track of such a large filesystem, but at least it doesn't have to worry about foreign bodies caught on the disk surface.
Theoretically, if you did the whole archive on a different non-Amiga system, then set the Bluray drive up to be accessed on an Amiga via IDE or SCSI, that would also be quicker access than using USB,
The above is much more of a concern on classic Amigas as opposed to Amiga4 onwards releases. It's doable on Amiga 4 onwards. It's a seriously challenging for earlier Amigas.
All the above is my opinion. I have not much experience of BluRay, and certainly none as far as using Bluray on an Amiga based system. A common solution it to host big databases in a network drive box, that can be accesssed by other systems over a network. If the network drive can take a Bluray drive, that might be a way to do it on anything that can talk over a network.
-
Those are good points. I could simply buy a 128GB USB thumb drive since they are cheap enough. And that is significantly easier to move around. The big problem with that is the memory requirements just to open the USB stack. An IDE or SATA->IDE bluray player would require a lot less RAM to mount but would probably use the same amount in memory to read the file system as you say. I'll keep pondering. Thanks for the input.
-
I have (2) Terabyte drives mapped using smbfs on my NAS to my A4000T as Nas1 and Nas2 and it doesn't seem to have trouble.. so 50 GB or so shouldn't be too much of a problem. I haven't tried a Blu-ray or large drive over USB yet.
-
I've successfully used 32GB flash drives with Poseidon & RapidRoad. Think the stack overhead was... *maybe* 2MB? I could go back and check it, if that would be helpful. Also plugged in a 4TB drive once. It recognized that it was plugged in, but was unable to read due to the drive being formatted NTFS (and I didn't have an NTFS file system installed at the time), lol. ;)
In any case, agree with the above comments - 64GB USB flash drives can be purchased new for under $20 USD. Get a couple of those, one to keep as a backup, and you should be good to go. :)
-
In terms of long-term archive strategy, the more formats and copies the better. I love the idea of 128GB Bluray (BDXL, which I have) but the media is ridiculously expensive and prohibitive for most hobbyist or home purposes. At this point we also have little reliability data available for Blueray's long-term longevity, compared to CDs and DVDs at this point in time.
Using a NAS with good backup strategy is good, too. Even a basic operating system load can access the data on a NAS using NFS, FTP, SMB, and other network protocols, and modern OSes will benefit from web-based browsing offered by many NASes. Beware, however, some NASes may not support older protocol versions or only support them read-only (EMC/Lenovo and NFSv3, for instance, or Netgear ReadyNAS and Samba 2.x) I would like to test, but I theorize one could load up a simple AmigaOS 3.1 installation with the demo of Roadshow or AmiTCP and smb-handler, smbclient, or nfs (the latter of which I have no experience on the Amiga.)
External hard drives (which IMNSHO should be considered volatile due to susceptibility to physical shock,) external SSD, and USB thumb drives are inexpensive these days, as mentioned.
But do we trust those for long-term storage? Endurance rates were tested within the past two years and found to be pretty fantastic for certain brands and types, and I have not yet seen a debunking of the process. Longevity is a different matter and Seagate released an article a while back concluding an SSD at rest WILL go "bad" over time, with the exception of certain types of enterprise-class drives.
Multiple formats also ensures that, in theory, at least one of those formats will be readable down the road. Imagine using a good archiving tape back in the day as the only storage format for your archives only to find the drive to read it is dead, and no drives are available. Some formats have worked to overcome this, for instance my DAT72 drive can read formats back to the original 2/4GB DAT though some DAT160 drives cannot, DLT pretty much the same, and even LTO is backward compatible to a certain degree, and while a universally-hated format among my peers Travan did a good job as well but is definitely a dead format. I keep on-hand a number of drives for each of these formats (including some old floppy controller-based QICs) just-in-case as I never know when I will be asked to try to recover one -- a habit which stemmed from an actual case about a decade back.)
Transitioning between an older and deprecating format to a newer one also gives you better long-term guarantees and a good opportunity for refreshing your data and correcting corrupt storage. (This strategy should also be applied to file formats, and thankfully today we have a number of programs which can read formats as old as ARK and LBR and with a little tweaking and emulation you can still read QIC and BKF files.)
Anyway, while not specifically answering the OP, my hope is that my ramblings may help someone avoid long-term loss of important information.
-
Solid state drive much better idea, more reliable in long term.
Flash is basically the worst for cold storage of data. JEDEC specs for an SSD only specify retention for a year without power. You'd be better off using an HDD at that rate. Or you could use archival quality BD-ROMs. You should be able to get a couple of decades out of them.
That's assuming the use case IS archiving. The thread seems to be going that way but it's not clear from the OP. But relying on flash long-term is risky and it's definitely not an archiving medium.