Automated optical mass storage system with 3-beam magneto-optical disk drives

An automated optical mass storage system (optical MSS) with high-speed magnetooptical (MO) disk drives has been developed. It features a high data transfer rate for writing with the use of the 130-mm ISO standard MO disk, and disk cartridges with high storage efficiency. As the key device, a high-speed MO disk drive has been developed. It provides a high-speed data writing capability of about ten times that of conventional MO disk drives. The optical MSS provides a data transfer rate for reading and writing of 2.1 MB/s, a storage capacity of 250 GB to 1 TB, and an average cartridge handling time of 5 s. From performance simulations, the optical MSS is proved to be applicable to a low-traffic random-access file that stores multimedia data and a high-speed direct-access storage device (DASD) backup file.<
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