Small-scale video on demand system will be necessary in the future. Cluster drives, which use optical disk drives, are a good buffer memory for this purpose because the cost per megabyte is low. An ordinary optical cluster drive has many SCSI buses and up to seven optical drives are connected to each SCSI bus. One drive from each bus is assembled to make a group of a cluster drive. The difference betweeen SCSI bus data transfer rate and sustained disk transfer rate enables the cluster drive to be simplified. Several drives on an SCSI bus make a sub-group. The video data is striped onto those sub-groups. When the total data transfer rate from disks within a sub-group exceeds the bus transfer rate, some drives can not acquire the bus. When drives connected to one SCSI bus are not identical, the block size of the data to be recorded on each drive has to be adjusted so that the maximum effective data transfer rate can be obtained. When the cycle times of a slow and fast drive are set identical, the effective data transfer rate is maximum, where one cycle consists of command time, minimum bus free time, disk read time, and bus transfer time.

This paper presents a Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) pre-emphasis technique which utilizes time-domain information processing to increase the data rate for a given bandwidth of interconnection. The PWM pre-emphasis method does not change the pulse amplitude as for conventional FIR pre-emphasis, but instead exploits timing resolution. This fits well with recent CMOS technology trends toward higher switching speeds and lower supply voltage. We discuss multiple-valued data transmission based on time-domain pre-emphasis techniques in consideration of higher-order channel effects. Also, a new data-dependent adaptive time-domain pre-emphasis technique is proposed to compensate for the data-dependent jitter.