A. We have a HP4020i CD-Writer drive attached to a Sun Sparc2 workstation. We use CDR's HyCD software. We have also used this drive and software with a Sparc5 and noticed about equal performance.
A. We have found through experience that is is best if no other processes are running on the workstation while we are creating the CD image file or burning the image file into the CD.
A. This can be done but the CD is not usable until after the final session is complete.
We encourage people to archive their data to zip drives or onto a large hard drive until they have enough data to fill up their CD. This will prevent them from creating a number of half filled CD's.
A. A normal CD holds 650 MByte of data but there are several variable factors to consider here. One, are you writing a lot of small files? If so, then the "table of contents" on the CD will take more space than if you were only writing several large files. There is also the format question. Our software allows Unix, DOS, Mac, and Windows formating. If we write using mulitiple formats then this also will take more disk space leaving less space for actual data writing. At the facility, we normally use Unix format and archive 500 MByte of data. This seems to work out ok for us.
A. Two things come to mind for us. One, a Unix system is case sensitive so the file name JOE.fid is different from joe.fid but our software views these files as the same and stops processing the data. Two, file names are limited to ~192 characters and path names are limited to~105 characters and not the unlimited lengths as stated by the software.