1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording and playback apparatus and a recording and playback method. More specifically, the present invention relates to a recording and playback apparatus which is suitable for recording and/or playing back a plurality of large capacity and real-time data files and to a recording and playback method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, video files of movies and so on have been recorded as video data in recording media by using a tape drive (tape streamer drive) or a hard disk drive. As recording media used for the tape drive, a magnetic tape having a recording capacity of several tens of giga bytes can be used.
In a tape drive, a file is recorded and played back by sequentially accessing a magnetic tape, and thus it takes time to perform search and to find the beginning of a file. Therefore, the tape drive is not suitable for recording and playing back data, particularly video files, which must be immediately accessed. Also, when the tape drive plays back a plurality of files written on one magnetic tape, the tape drive can play back only one file at a time.
On the other hand, a random access can be realized in a hard disk device, and thus recording and playback can be performed immediately. Further, the hard disk device can play back a plurality of files at the same time. However, the price per recording capacity of the hard disk device is higher than that of a magnetic tape. Thus, the hard disk device has generally a small recording capacity and is not suitable for recording video files having a large capacity.
The applicant of the present invention has proposed a high-capacity storage system formed by combining a hard disk device and a tape drive, which is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2000-283563. However, this system cannot record and/or play back a plurality of files immediately.