On 7/20/2001, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced an update to the Optical Disk Device Driver to support the Sony SMO-F561 (9.1 GB) optical drives. The update is available for AIX 4.x, Solaris 2.6, 7, and 8, UnixWare 7, and HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00. The device driver will support media with sector sizes of 512, 1024, 2048, and 4096 bytes per sector.

On 5/2/2000, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced an update to the Optical Disk Device Driver to support the newer MaxOptix drives (T4-2600, T5-2600, and T6-5200). The update is available for AIX 4.x, Solaris 2.6 and 7, UnixWare 2.x and 7, and HP-UX 10.20 and 11.0. The changes can be rolled into other platforms as the need arises. This version of the Optical Disk Device Driver will also configure any SCSI device that answers an INQUIRY as an optical memory, WORM or direct access device and indicates that the medium is removeable. This does not compromise any of the features of the explicitly supported devices.

On 3/13/2000, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced an update to the existing Opticak Disk Device Driver to support the Plasmon-LMSI 8000-series optical disk drives. These drives will provide 30GB of optical disk storage per volume. Both standalone drives and the 6 and 12 disk autochanger models will be supported. The update will first be available for Solaris with other platforms to follow shortly.

On 10/7/1999, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced an update to the existing Optical Disk Device Driver for AIX 4.x that supports the Hitachi GF-1050 DVD-RAM drive in the same way that other 8x optical drives are supported. This means that the relatively inexpensive DVD-RAM drive can be used in place of the more expensive 8x optical disk drives in an optical disk subsystem using our device driver on AIX. We will add the GF-1050 support into other device drivers, but since some systems will claim the device as a CD-ROM (since it answers back as a CD-ROM type SCSI device), it may not be trivial to configure it. [Update 2/2000: The GF-1050 device has been successfully configured on Solaris 2.6 and Solaris7 as well as UnixWare 2.x, UnixWare 7, and AIX 4.2. Support for DVD-RAM jukeboxes is in the works!].

On 6/1/1999, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced an update to the existing Optical Disk Device Drivers that supports 2048 byte-per-sector media in the supported 8x drives (Sony SMO-F551, HP C1113J, and IBM 0632-C4D). In addition, the MO, CCW, and (true-ablative) WORM functionality of the Sony and IBM 8x drives is supported.

On 7/15/1998, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced an update to the OD device driver to support the Sony SMO-F551 and HP C1113J 5.2GB drives. The Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. Write Once Filesystem(TM) Primitives Library currently requires that 512 byte-per-sector or 1024 byte-per-sector media be used with the 5.2GB drives.

On 5/16/1997, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced an update to the OD device driver that supports the Nikon Beluga (5.25" quad-density direct over-write), IBM 5.25" 2.6GB (quad-density) drive with extended multifunction capabilities (true, ablative WORM as well as rewritable and CCW),

On 8/23/1996, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. released an update to the OD device drivers for SCO, AIX 3.2.5 and 4.x, HPUX 9.0.5, Solaris2.x, and DGUX 5.4 including support for the IBM quad-density 0632 C4x drives.

On 3/21/1996, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. released an update to the OD device drivers for SCO, AIX 3.2.5, HPUX 9.0.5, and Solaris2.x, including support for Pinnacle's Apex (4.6GB), Sony's SMO-F541 (2.6GB), and HP's C1113F/H (2.6GB) optical drives.

On 7/20/2001, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced an update to the existing Jukebox Device Driver (jb) that includes support for the newer features of the Plasmon M500 jukebox (this includes support for the rotate mailbox command). The device driver is immediately available for UnixWare 7 and can be made available for any of the existing platforms.

On 7/15/1998, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced an update to the existing JB device drivers that includes support for the HP EX-series jukeboxes.

On 5/17/1997, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced a update to the existing JB device drivers that will configure any SCSI-2 device that responds as a CHANGER to the SCSI INQUIRY command.

On 8/23/1996, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. released an update to the JB device drivers for SCO, AIX 3.2.5 and 4.x, HPUX 9.0.5, Solaris2.x, and DGUX 5.4 including support for the IBM C-series jukeboxes.

On 3/21/1996, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. released an update to the JB device drivers for SCO, AIX 3.2.5, HPUX 9.0.5, and Solaris2.x which includes support for the HP ST- and FX-series and the Plasmon/IDE M-series jukeboxes.

On 4/4/2002, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced the release of the 64-bit version of its popular Optical Disk (OD) and Jukebox (JB) device drivers for Solaris 8.

On 4/15/1999, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced the release of updated Optical Disk and Jukebox Device Drivers for NCR SVR4 MP-RAS.

On 7/1/1997, Sun Coast SoftWorks, Inc. announced the release of an updated Optical Disk Device Driver for UnixWare 2.x. The Jukebox Device Driver will be available in mid-July.

New features:

-h option on all standard w1commands to display detailed usage message.

-V option on all w1commands to display the software version.

Of the commands included in the standard release, only odmodes and w1qrm do not implement the -h and -V options.

jbmounter:

Each platter is assigned a "home slot" to which the platter is always returned when it is no longer needed in a drive (earlier versions used a dynamic allocation scheme to return a platter to the next available slot). As a result of this enhancement, the volume information file only needs to be updated when a volume is imported, exported, or labeled.

Since the checkpointing of the volume locations has been simplified, this version of the jbmounter defaults to warm starting (i.e. the volume information file is assumed to reflect the current state of the jukebox when the jbmounter is started).

NOTE: The sizes of the volume information and platter information structures have changed, as a result, this version of the mounter will not be able to use the version of the volume information file (vi=vol_info_file_name in the configuration file) written by the previous jbmounter. Use pvi -c -i vol_info_file_name -o new_file_name to convert the volume information to the new format.

There is an improvement in the algorithm for reporting the contents of the jukebox and standalone drives. In previous versions, if w1inv was in the process of reporting the jukebox contents when another w1inv was started, neither process would get the entire jukebox contents. The inventory requests are now serialized so that the mounter will not lose track of which volume is to be reported.

odutil:

To accomodate the new -h option for a usage message, we now use -x to indicate that data read from the disk are to be displayed in hexdump form.

saunmount linked to w1export
samount linked to w1import
salabel linked to w1label

Each of these commands can be called using the old command syntax or the new syntax (specify -h option to display new syntax).

w1clear:

-f will clear the entire platter even if the vol_nxt_fblock and vol_nxt_dblock values do not warrant it.

-v displays status as volume is cleared.

w1import:

-r option to import in READ ONLY mode (i.e. vol_nxt_dblock is not checked). This permits volumes with unreadable sectors in the redundant file header space to be imported.

w1info:

-l show the volume's location

-m show the volume's medium type

More than one volume name can be specified and the volume info for each will be displayed in turn.

w1inv:

Inventory requests are now serialized with the mounter so that several instances of w1inv can be run concurrently and all will get the same results.

w1label:

-r relabel a (rewritable) volume.

w1mount:

-b run w1mount in the background so that the volume will remain reserved. When the -b option is used, w1mount displays its process id and a message to the effect that the volume can be released by killing the process.

w1pm:

-d set the optical disk drive

-m display preventive maintenance statistics (default)

-r display relocation information for the platter in the drive.

w1unmount:

-p specify the process ID of the process for which the dequeue request is being made.

New commands:

pvi:

Display the volume information file (specified by the vi= entry on the config file, jb.info or sa.info) in human-readable form. It can also convert the file from the old (pre-home_slot) format to the currently used form. This makes it unnecessary to rebuild the volume information with a cold start of the jbmounter.

w1backup:

Copy files from a w1_fs volume in tar(1) format. The file name in the tar header is of the form:
volume_name:file_name@start_sector
(w1restore is coming in the next release).

w1fixvol:

Update the volume information

w1toc:

Same as old odls.

-d specify the optical disk drive.

It is likely that odls will disappear in a future release.

The utilities, w1import, w1export, and w1label now report failure causes in human-readable form. Possible reasons for failure include: All drives busy, Jukebox Offline, Duplicate volume name, Unknown volume, and Jukebox move failed.

The jbmounter and samounter now timestamp incoming requests and any errors so that they can be correlated with the device driver's error log.

Support for 2048 byte-per-sector media has been added. This includes both 5.2GB optical media and DVD-RAM. The DVD-RAM is only supported where the device driver supports the drive.

Support for 4096 byte-per-sector media has been added. This was necessary to support the Sony 9.1 GB drives and Plasmon/LMS 8000 series..

We have recently completed two projects that permit retrieval of data from disks written with other vendors' software while archiving data to new platters in our format. This allows our customers to continue to use the older platters until the data on them is either no longer needed or has been copied to newer higeer density platters. The potential savings in lost productivity during conversion and in the cost of data conversion itself can be enormous. If you have data in an older format that is no longer supported, we may be able to help.