Re: CD Towers for Macs

Richard Pooran (rpooran@infobahnos.com)
Tue, 23 Jan 1996 23:44:41 EST

Rona King wrote:
>I am in the process of writing a grant for a multimedia research
>library at the 4-6 grade level. I was wondering what the real advantages
>and disadvantages of using a CD tower versus individual CD's per
>machine. Is the retrieval time on the towers the same as individual
>CD's? What happens when two computers access the same CD? What kind of
>network hook-up should be used.? (At present we are not networked,
>however, we plan on networking four computers to a server as part of the
>grant.) Would you recommend a 7 CD or 14 CD tower? I have had difficulty
>in finding advertised CD towers, so if you have a good resource for towers
>and any recommendations,please let me know.
>
>Has anybody purchased the Library server package from Apple, if so, is it
>worth buying for this project. I understand that the Apple
>package comes with a 7 CD tower.

I recently put a CD tower into the Mac network at Lower Canada College. It
is a "CD/Maxtet 6.7x" by Optical Access International. This was the best
tower we could find for the price (about $11000 Can). The tower is hooked
up (via SCSI cable) to my network server (on an ethernet network). It holds
7 CD's but only uses one of the SCSI id's of my server. The access time is
GREAT over the network. Of course the more users you have sharing one CD
the slower the acess but 3 or 4 users on a CD does not pose any problem at
all. We use a CD software called E-Stat and have no problem using it with a
whole class (20 students). The tower is relatively new to us so I don't
have conclusive data yet but I like it alot. It allows me to control the
CD's much easier and also allows more than one person to share information
on a CD. Our network spans over two floors of the school and will span over
3 floors next year. I think that in the long run it is better to have main
resource CD's in a tower as well as specalized CD's in other areas of the
school. The Maxtet also allows you to control the internal CD of your
server if you have one (as an eighth CD).

If you have any other questions feel free to contact me.

Richard Pooran
Lower Canada College
rpooran@infobahnos.com
phone 514 482-9916 (ext265)