One of the first examples of an optical jukebox was the unit designed and built at the Royal Aerospace Establishment at Farnborough, England.
[3] Jukeboxes typically contain internal SCSI- or SATA-based recordable drives (CD-ROM, CD-R, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RAM, UDO or Blu-ray) that connect directly to a file server and are managed by a third-party jukebox management software.
This software controls the movement of media within the jukebox, and the pre-mastering of data prior to the recording process.
Before the advent of the modern SAN and much cheaper hard disks, high-volume storage on DVD was more cost-effective than magnetic media.
Optical disc libraries like the TeraStack Solution can store up to 142 TB of online and nearline data with a nominal power draw of 425 watts.
When the management software is run, it will send inquiry requests to the optical library for the status of its contents.
Filesystem types available for optical media range from ISO standard technologies like UDF to proprietary formats.
[8] Essentially, the whole of an optical library can be viewed, read to and written to via a virtual filesystem while the management software handles all of the media movement and I/O requests invisibly in the background.
A more efficient recommendation is to have a disk cache attached to the jukebox for a higher number of simultaneous users.
Changes may or may not be saved or versioned based on the user configuration and accessibility settings on the storage management software that runs the optical jukebox.
The drives will read and write the data to the RAID / Disc cache and then present to end users.