Evaluating jukebox performance

Thanks to their low cost and high capacity, jukebox CD-ROM systems are becoming popular mass storage devices for multi-user computer systems. As their name suggests, they hold many disks, and they usually play several at a time, with a robotic handler moving the disks between the disk store and disk drive or drives. Meanwhile, numerous manufacturers are producing devices in many shapes and sizes, with different numbers of disks, different disk capacities, and different numbers and types of drives. Hence an interesting and important problem: how to compare them. More particularly, which factors should get the most weight when the need is to evaluate the performance of competitive products in various situations? At present, the specifications for CD-ROM jukeboxes are few and far between and mostly apply to the individual drives within the jukebox system, rather than to the system as a whole