Hewlett-Packard Co has begun shipping its 5.25 optical-disk jukeboxes using a 2.6Gb capacity magneto-optical disk drive that doubles the capacities of the company’s optical-storage products. Existing SureStore optical jukeboxes now will be based on the 2.6Gb drives and disk cartridges. Read and write speeds of the 3,000rpm third-generation optical drive are twice as fast as previous-generation magneto-optical drives and have been specifically designed for use in applications such as document and image management, archival-data storage, network storage, hierarchical storage management and data warehousing. The 2.6Gb drives have 3.4Mb per second read speed and 1.7Mb per second write speeds, an advancd caching algorithm and boast a mean time between failures rating of 100,000 hours. The optical- jukebox robotics have up to 2m swaps before failure. The new 2.6Gb products are compatible with rewritable and write-once disks. The drives can read and write industry- standard 1.3Gb magneto-optical platters and can read 650Mb industry-standard disks, to maintain compatibility with existing libraries of older archived disks. The 2.6Gb jukebox series is available with one to 12 optical drives with capacities from 40Gb to 618Gb. Prices start from about $7,000, rising to about $93,900.
