ATAPI CD changers anybody ?

[Bill Vermillion]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 23:27 in freebsd-hackers-request at freebsd.org:


> ------------------------------

> Message: 6
> Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 17:36:52 +0100
> From: S?ren Schmidt<sos at DeepCore.dk>
> Subject: ATAPI CD changers anybody ?

> Seems I lost my lonely ATAPI CDROM with built in changer to the
> eternal HW scrapyards, let it rest in peace :)

> Finding a new one seems difficult so I thought I'd ask around
> how many still has one of these ?

> I ask because the support code for those seem to have suffered
> bitrot to the degree that it most likely hasn't worked on
> -current (maybe even 5.x) for a long time, but alas I cant test
> that.

> Now, since it seems that such devices are no longer made, and
> newer really caught on, I need some good reasons to keep the
> (broken) support in there.

My own opinion since HD capacity is getting larger and larger is
that unless you have a large amount of CDs that you need to rotate
in and out - and if there are many it would constantly be reloading
the changer - is to make images of all the CDs you need to 
access, then run vnconfig to set up mount points, and access
the as local file systems?  IT surely is a lot faster.

You could mount 10 CD images this way and only use up 6GB space
and with 500GB HDs coming in at $399 [I saw local ads for that last
week] it could be cheaper than trying to find a changer.


> End of freebsd-hackers Digest, Vol 97, Issue 2

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com