TEST DRIVE

Compelling Cost/Capacity in a DVD Jukebox

The DVD 100 is a server-sized unit that handles up to 100 discs. However, it doesn’t flip the DVDs over, so it can only harness one 2.6-gigabyte side of a DVD-RAM disc. This gives you 260 GB of storage, which is impressive enough, though some manufacturers are working on flipping mechanisms to make use of two-sided discs.

There are no control buttons on the DVD 100 at all. The only features on the front panel are some status LEDs, a power switch and a door lock. Behind the door are spaces for five 20-disc magazines. The magazines must be loaded by hand. The jukebox has no mail slot, so there is no means to import or export individual disks. Once loaded, you can’t swap discs out of the jukebox without opening it up and triggering a disk inventory.

The lack of a mail slot has larger implications for DVD-RAM jukeboxes than for CD. Loading discs into the DVD 100 requires that you load them directly into the magazines. This requires more than average dexterity. This wasn’t as much of a problem with CDs because they’re fairly robust; scratches, dust, and fingerprints aren’t as likely to affect their operation. DVD-RAM disks, however, are more fragile and are more easily damaged by handling. This is why consumer DVD-RAM disks come in hard plastic cartridges. As long as you’re careful you won’t have a problem, but a mail slot would be more convenient.

The back of the DVD 100 has a SCSI port with built-in termination. The unit can be daisy chained into a longer SCSI chain. Near the top of the unit is a row of SCSI ID selector switches. There is also provision for an internal hard drive for caching and network attached operation.

An odd legacy of CD compatibility left a pair of audio outputs on the back of the unit, making this one of the few jukeboxes that can be used as a CD player. (Perhaps Cygnet should have included a pair of video outputs so the DVD 100 could be used to watch movies.)

The DVD 100 we brought into our lab had two Hitachi DVD-RAM drives. This is the standard configuration, but the jukebox can accommodate up to four drives. During testing the Hitachi drives were able to record files at about 9 megabytes per minute.

Drive speed in a jukebox is often masked by the jukebox management system. The Cygnet DVD 100 was tested with Smartstor DVD jukebox management software from Smart Storage (Andover, MA). The software cached our block of test data on the hard drive before writing it to DVD-RAM.

Swapping disks took about ten seconds — each media movement taking about five seconds. While this is slow compared to some (more expensive) CD jukeboxes, it is competitive with MO swap speeds. High-capacity media and good caching from the jukebox management software should mitigate the disk swapping time. CD jukeboxes have to swap disks quite fast since each disk only holds 650 MB. Each single-sided DVD-RAM disc holds four times as much data as a CD, so disc thrashing should be much less of a problem.

At $7,800, the Cygnet DVD 100 offers a lot of capacity at a competitive price. If you need to swap discs, the lack of a mail slot will be an inconvenience, but the unit’s cost/capacity ratio makes it very suitable for near-line archival storage used in concert with hard disk cache. If you are using MO or Tape archives and want to move to a less expensive or faster storage medium, DVD-RAM and Cygnet’s DVD 100 are viable alternatives.

—Lowell Rapaport