| 摘要 |
A high-capacity jukebox device for storing and accessing computer readable media. The present invention comprises a 1394-to-ATAPI bridge for coupling to other devices via an IEEE 1394 bus, an ATAPI drive coupled to the ATAPI bridge for communicating with the other devices, and a jukebox controller for controlling the robotics mechanism of the jukebox device. Significantly, according to one embodiment of the present invention, the ATAPI drive comprises a first serial port and the ATAPI jukebox controller includes a second serial port coupled to the first serial port for communicating with the ATAPI drive. In this way, the expensive conventional SCSI LSI and SCSI firmware are eliminated from the jukebox controller, effectively lowering the manufacturing and development costs of the jukebox of the present invention. An additional benefit is that ATAPI drives are less costly than SCSI drives and are more widely available. Since most commercially available embedded processors include a serial interface, implementation cost for such a design is also low, and modifications to existing ATAPI drives are also minimal. Another benefit of the jukeboxes of the present invention is that a large number of them can be daisy-chained together.
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