[23206] in Athena Bugs
Re: Zip drives are horribly broken
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Thu Jul 24 10:07:22 2003
Mime-Version: 1.0
Message-Id: <p05200f00bb4595cf9a43@[18.152.1.192]>
In-Reply-To: <200307241236.h6OCa3CE021104@brad-majors.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:07:18 -0400
To: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
Cc: hotline@mit.edu, bugs@mit.edu
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
> >> Others have respnoded saying they're "going away anyhow." I don't know
>>> what we're supposed to tell users with zip drives though. I suppose
>>> it'll be, "Well, Athena decided to ditch them. We have one on that
>>> machine over there *points*..."
>
> I'd start by encouraging people to migrate their data to CD-R; Zip
>drives seem to be going the way of the dodo in the world at large and
>while I suspect we can support them on Suns a while longer (since it's
>easy) they're probably not a good long term storage bet.
>
Do we have an ETA for this? Even a ball-park ETA would be useful
(ie: "within 2 years"). If they really are going away, it might be
useful for us to update the OLC stock answers on zip drives now with
a paragraph encouraging people to migrate to CD-R(W). However, there
is one unfortunate issue surrounding that, namely that we don't (as
far as I know) have Sun hardware which supports any recordable CD
format. Since the CD-R capable linux machines (gx150s and epros) are
fairly widely deployed, this is OK, but having some high-capacity
removable storage solution that is consistent across platforms (as
zip drives once were) might be useful. Do we have any information as
to whether or not we might see Sun machines with CD-R drives in thhe
future??
If Zip Drives are going away, it might also useful for OLC to hang on
to some, so students aren't totally screwed....
-Jon
--
-------------------
Jonathan Reed
jdreed@mit.edu
-------------------
