gbtnews 12 March 2001

To:   Prospective GBT Users, NRAO Users Committee 

From: Richard Prestage, Head, Green Bank Computing

Date: 13th March 2001

Re:   Data storage media for GBT Observers


We will soon be buying some additional tape drives (or CD/DVD writers) to
allow visiting observers to take away copies of their data. We already
have a variety of tape drives (DDS-3/4, Exabyte) although some of these
are getting rather old. We will almost certainly buy at least one more
DDS-4 drive.

The purpose of this email is to see whether there is a strong (hopefully
common) demand to provide other types of drive, for example:

Quantum DLT 8000
Exabyte Mammoth 2
Ultrium LTO
CD-R
DVD+RW, DVD-RAM

Note that these tape drive(s) will be for "typical" observers making
export copies of their data in non-real time. The problem of supporting
observing modes such as pulsar search observations, which may require
high-speed archiving of large datasets, possibly in real or near-real
time, is being addressed separately.

We clearly will not be able to support every conceivable tape/disk
format, however we will do our best to support the most commonly
requested ones.

If you have any opinions or comments to make on this topic, please email
me.

Regards,
			Richard Prestage