Free Solution to a Capacity Problem

From the March 2002 Edition
of Windows IT Pro
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InstantDoc #23781
Windows IT Pro

I work for a law firm that subscribes to several vendors who provide legal data (archived and updated) on CD-ROM. We have a CD-ROM tower with seven bays. The information on the CD-ROMs is shared from this tower to the network. The number of CD-ROMs my firm subscribes to recently increased to 10. I knew I needed to make all 10 CD-ROMs available because the attorneys often make decisions based on the latest legal rulings that these CD-ROMs contain, but I couldn't accommodate the 3 extra CD-ROMs in the tower.

A potential solution was to purchase a 20-bay tower, but management frowned at the $2400 price. I knew that most CD-ROMs don't use their entire 650MB capacity, so I decided to use 25GB of free disk space on one of our Windows NT 4.0 servers to share the CD-ROMs on the network. I made an image copy of each CD-ROM on the server's hard disk. Then, I created a folder for each CD-ROM. I placed the image copy of each CD-ROM in the corresponding folder on the server's hard disk. I then shared these folders on the network. I used permissions to limit certain CD-ROMs to specific departments. I even used the logon script to map some folders to drives.

I can now accommodate at least 30 CD-ROMs. In addition, users experience increased speed accessing the CD-ROMs because the 10,000rpm SCSI hard disk is faster than the 40X CD-ROM drive. My new system has been working well for several months, and management is happy that I improved performance without spending money.

—Matthew D. Kocot
mdk@jkwlaw.com

End of Article

I've recently been using Virtual-CD which goes one step further than this solution, because the CDs are allocated "virtually" to free drives and then accessed exactly as if they are in a CDROM drive but faster. There's even a compress posibility.

In addition you can with the latest version make DVD's available in the same way.

www.virtual-cd.de

Mike Walsh February 20, 2002

My previous job was in a school, we had the same problem. I found though that NT4 (as was the NOS of choice at the time) was unable to support more than 14 concurrent connections to the same data, even then it was slow... Eventual solution was to run samba on bsd (most would use linux but i'm not a fan) the beauty of this is that a) you can take an iso image and mount the iso, b) you can easily tweak samba samba to improve performace - the best being disabling op-lock checking which removed 80% of the overhead (only safe on read only shares) and c) you can happily use an obsolete server (our old dual pentium 120 with a dual port nic served 360 simultaneous clients quite acceptably - we tested it!)

AS August 06, 2003

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