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By Marc Spiwak
CD-ROMs are a valuable resource in any office-so valuable that many people tend to stash their favorite titles in their own offices, preventing others from using them. NSM Jukebox's Mercury 40 NET does away with migrating CD-ROMs by serving up to 150 from a single, locked location. About the same size as a PC tower, the unit is very well constructed and weighs about 70 pounds. Fortunately, it has wheels!
The Mercury 40 NET contains four quad-speed drives and three 50-disc magazines, for an approximate total of 93.75GB of data storage. With four drives, users can access up to four discs at once, and it takes only about four seconds for the jukebox's robotics to exchange one disc for another. Time to deliver data (TDD) runs about seven seconds. You can completely prefill magazines or load and unload individual discs through the "mail slot" disc drawer.
Designed for direct connection to a Novell network at any location, the Mercury 40 NET provides control and data routing from a single Ethernet connector. All four drives appear as a single network device. In tandem with Novell NetWare 3.11, 3.12 and 4.x, the bundled NLM (NetWare Loadable Module) provides control and data management. There's full support for DOS, all flavors of Windows, Mac, OS/2 and UNIX.
I hoped that getting the jukebox to work would be as simple as plugging it into the network and installing a software program, but I ran into a frustrating problem. A DLL necessary to a Windows 3.1x installation was nowhere to be found on my "virgin" Win95 setup. The installation program could not continue without it. NSM's excellent technical support group provided on-site assistance, and collectively we discovered the missing DLL. Once we copied it from another system, the jukebox installation went quite smoothly. NSM will include the DLL on future installation disks.
The last step is to install the bundled Microtest DiscView software that permits a network administrator to set disc access privileges. If you could only map one CD to one drive letter, you'd obviously be limited to 26 (or less) discs. DiscView instead maps several CDs to a single drive letter; each appears as a subdirectory.
--Info File--
NSM Jukebox Mercury 40 NET
Price: $21,000
Pros: Excellent network CD-ROM distribution
Cons: Price
Platforms: 3x, 95, NT
NSM Jukebox
800-238-4676, 630-860-5100
WinMag Box Score: 3.5
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