USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004)

http://web.archive.org/web/20040202110812/http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm

by donnachangstein • 1 year ago

65 20 1 year ago

web.archive.org

rideontime• 1 year ago

He's not wrong, Riviera is pretty groovy. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvjLW0i-2Ebq9iQoZ-m2R...

jmclnx• 1 year ago

I remember reading something like this a very long time ago. It must have been about what this guy did. Real cool.

rzzzt• 1 year ago

The 8-Bit Guy (formerly iBook Guy) created an array using USB sticks: https://youtu.be/dougISKs2vQ

Action Retro has a video with floppies: https://youtu.be/1hc52_PWeU8

He also references a MacWorld article with Daniel's array: https://www.macworld.com/article/165663/floppyraid.html

geerlingguy• 1 year ago

Was going to post the Action Retro attempt. Latency is abysmal, yet it's still a glorious thing to see it (kinda) work at all.

Need to see if someone can hack together RAID on cassettes on an old Apple II

pridkett• 1 year ago

This is, quite possibly, one of the best nerd sniping comments I’ve seen.

Two thoughts come to mind, one not serious, one serious.

1. I can’t imagine having to align the counters on all those tapes.

2. I’m guessing this would really only work for sequential reading and writing. In some ways that makes it more fun as the latency would be that much worse.

mrweasel• 1 year ago

There is a YouTube video on the Action Retro channel, where this article is used as inspiration. Apparently you're not able to use any random floppy drive, but you can use more than five.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8

somat3• 1 year ago

I have done it with usb floppy drives under openbsd, I am sure it is just as trivial under linux but I had obsd and a bunch of usb floppy drives at my disposal.

    #it has been a few years I don't remember if it works with bare drives or if you need a disklabel on each floppy
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    #the raid will show up now, check dmesg
    disklabel -E sd5
    newfs /dev/sd5a
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy/
    umount /mnt/floppy
    bioctl -d sd5
    #after inserting all floppies reassemble the raid
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy

I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

One day in what was probably sullen resentment that openbsd has no equivalent to DRBD I assembled a raid on iscsi drives, that is, initiate 5 iscsi sessions to independent hosts then assemble a raid with them. and you can imagine my surprise when it very nearly worked, I could read and write just fine. The part that did not work was drive failure. My guess is that iscsid did not fail a drive in a way that softraid understood. so a drive failure just lead to everything hanging.

yjftsjthsd-h• 1 year ago

I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

Yeah:)

Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

- Doug Gwyn

accrual• 1 year ago

I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

Agree! My first thought while reading the article was that it would be very easy to do this on OpenBSD as well, either with USB floppies or normal 34-pin drives as well.

OpenBSD's softraid stack doesn't care much about what the underlying hardware is as long as it looks like a disk and talks like a disk.

tombert2• 1 year ago

I thought about trying this with LTO drives, to have a ridiculously slow but also ridiculously high capacity raid, but sadly the LTO tape decks are a bit too expensive for this experiment.

kevin_thibedeau• 1 year ago

U320 SCSI LTO-5 can be had cheap. Nobody wants them these days.

tombert2• 1 year ago

Yeah though that wouldn’t have a lot of storage, only 1.5 terabytes per tape. A new 2TB SSD is only about $100 and can easily be connected via usb.

irusensei• 1 year ago

Not floppies but I clearly remember some Sun Microsystems video demonstrating ZFS where some guys dressed as over the top engineers randomly disconnecting USB thumb drives that were part of a pool to show the file system resilience.

mattl• 1 year ago

Is that the same video where they shout at a hard disk?

wkat4242• 1 year ago

I love the "because I can" projects. There's another guy that made a whole music box from hundreds of floppies. Amazing. I love that kind of dedication.

One of my 'friends' is very capitalist and it makes him actually angry that people spend so much time on something that doesn't make money. I find it sad that he doesn't understand the concept of fun. And he has plenty of money.

Macha2• 1 year ago

This feels like a storage solution that needs a "|0| days since last data loss" sign. Take the reliability of floppies under continuous read write cycles and divide it by 5?

somat3• 1 year ago

The whole point is to avoid data loss, floppies are notoriously prone to failure, if you can do raid on floppy, you can survive loss of a disk.

Now if you are stripping... Well... then sure the data loss is your own fault, you have taken the R out of RAID.

Macha2• 1 year ago

Right but as the title and post say, we are discussing striping.

USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004)

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