The low cost per Mbyte of optical disk and magnetic tape storage makes these technologies particularly attractive for use in large capacity storage servers, including multimedia servers. However, these devices have performance problems that range from high costs for many optical drives to low performance and lack of random access in tape drives. We evaluate the performance on multimedia applications of several tertiary storage systems, including optical disk jukeboxes, arrays of optical drives, and storage hierarchies composed of magnetic disk arrays and magnetic tape libraries. We conclude that striped arrays of next-generation write-once optical disks will offer the best performance at acceptable cost.
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