| William H. Magill on Thu, 1 May 2003 17:45:13 -0400 |
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On Thursday, May 1, 2003, at 02:29 PM, Edmund Goppelt wrote: Since I assume you've seen web sites running off tape stores before, can you point out a couple to me?
Given contemporary expectation of response time, no website could possibly ever operate off tape. Suppose you have a tape full of records... Those records at the beginning of the tape can be accessed in, possibly tens of seconds. However, if you want to get a record from the "other end" (where "other" means the opposite of where the tape is presently positioned) you have to either fast-forward to that point or rewind to it. Then you are talking about "minutes" of access time! Tapes hold a lot of data, but they are 1- sequential in access 2- S..L..O..W. And of course, that assumes that the tape you want is already mounted. If the tape has to be mounted, add about another minute... and if it has to be physically mounted, from a jukebox add another 5 or 10 minutes... and if it has to be mounted by a human operator -- it could take days! (Especially if the tape is not in the computer room, but is located in the "library" and the tape has to be requested, signed out, transported to the computer room -- and then you wait around for a physical tape drive to mount it on... T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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