Mass storage systems for data transport in the early space station era 1992-1998

NASA's Space Station Program will provide a vehicle to deploy an unprecedented number of data producing experiments and operational devices. Peak down link data rates are expected to be in the 500 megabit per second range and the daily data volume could reach 2.4 terabytes. Such startling requirements inspired an internal NASA study to determine if economically viable data storage solutions are likely to be available to support the Ground Data Transport segment of the NASA data system. To derive the requirements for data storage subsystems, several alternative data transport architectures were identified with different degrees of decentralization. Data storage operations at each subsystem were categorized based on access time and retrieval functions, and reduced to the following types of subsystems: First in First out (FIFO) storage, fast random access storage, and slow access with staging. The study showed that industry funded magnetic and optical storage technology has a reasonable probability of meeting these requirements. There are, however, system level issues that need to be addressed in the near term.