Optical Disk Cluster Drive and Its Optical Filler Disk

Optical memory has the advantage of large capacity, media removability and high reliability. However, when it is used in such systems as a home server, video on demand or network server, the data transfer rate is too low. Use of an optical cluster drive is one of the promising methods of increasing the data transfer rate. The technical issues of optical cluster drive are reliability, synchronization and filling of the disk exchange masking time. High reliability can be obtained by application of the error-correcting code to recording data. The time delay caused by verification can be circumvented by utilization of the error-correcting code. Operation of the optical cluster drive is masked during disk exchange. An optical filler disk can eliminate the masking while satisfying the numerous requirements of an optical cluster drive.