Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 81 posts

Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

#21

Post by somat »

__lm__ wrote: post #18
eby wrote: post #5

Finally, a use for that drawer full of 1 GB USB drives!

When Sun Microsystems was still existing they made a (quite funny) video putting 12 usb sticks in a ZFS pool with RAID: https://constantin.glez.de/2011/01/24/how-save-world-zfs-and...

I wanted to boot my home truenas box off usb flash, but I also know how flakey usb flash can be, so I use a pair of drives in a zfs mirror.

I would not recommend this setup, Any real drive would be better. I just hated wasting drive bays for the non-critical boot/system partition. In my defense despite burning through many cheap usb drives I have not lost the boot yet, however I do keep a new spare drive taped to the unit.

Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

#22

Post by iforgotpassword »

woleium wrote: post #13
eru wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like you copied the CD version via a floppy disk? It would have probably been faster to put your friends hard disk into your computer for a few minutes and copy directly from disk to disk?

remember laplink?

I remember interlnk. It seemed like magic the first time I used it.

Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

#23

Post by somat »

accrual wrote: post #3

This would be fun to try with OpenBSD's softraid.

Can confirm, it is fun, also fun was raid5 using iscsi drives, which surprisingly almost worked. Almost in that while I could assemble and access the raid unit, it behaved very poorly(hard hangs) on drive failure. But it was fun, sort of like a super redneck network distributed filesystem.

Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

#25

Post by smueller1234 »

buildbot wrote: post #17

What’s the weirdest thing one can raid together these days? Maybe a bunch of raspberry pi picos?

Sorry for a second response to the same comment. While on the topic of entertainment, consider the opposite of putting erasure codes on many weird devices!

Years ago, some colleagues and I did the napkin math over lunch to estimate what a single hard drive would look like that could store all of Google's data. This was for a humorous internal talk. The linear speeds of the outer sectors were enough to leave the solar system (not just higher than Earth's escape velocity). Good laughs were had, I think.

Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

#26

Post by hdjdkdbdbe »

somat wrote: post #21
__lm__ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Sun Microsystems was still existing they made a (quite funny) video putting 12 usb sticks in a ZFS pool with RAID: https://constantin.glez.de/2011/01/24/how-save-world-zfs-and...

I wanted to boot my home truenas box off usb flash, but I also know how flakey usb flash can be, so I use a pair of drives in a zfs mirror. I would not recommend this setup, Any real drive would be better. I just hated wasting drive bays for the non-critical boot/system partition. In my defense despite burning through many cheap usb drives I have not lost the boot yet, however I do keep a new spare drive taped to the…

I have the same setup for my router ... Openbsd 16-32gb if one dies I create a new one and set it up with ansible....

Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

#27

Post by dale_glass »

Fun fact: There's also 2X speed floppy drives, and maybe even higher. So this can be improved further with the right drives.

I believe they were mainly used in things like photo cameras, during the short period of time when photo cameras used floppies to store stuff, and the slow write speed was a bottleneck.

Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

#28

Post by khazhoux »

johnzim wrote: post #4

I clicked the link after reading just the first 4 words of the title. I didn't see the year it was written until I had closed the link - perhaps it was added after the initial submission. After reading the article through I was struck by the tone. It was a breath of fresh air - so optimistic and enthusiastic and not in the least bit self-important or unduly serious. It made me excited to read more! When I saw the '(2…

> Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?

And not just Wired. It seems everything was more optimistic and exciting 10 years before whenever you’re reading this comment.

Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

#29

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

buildbot wrote: post #17

What’s the weirdest thing one can raid together these days? Maybe a bunch of raspberry pi picos?

Not that weird, but I've thought about RAIDing some USB thumb drives together. Might actually be a good way to get practice with your choice of RAID software for cheap, come to think of it.

Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)

#30

Post by buildbot »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #29
buildbot wrote: post #17

What’s the weirdest thing one can raid together these days? Maybe a bunch of raspberry pi picos?

Not that weird, but I've thought about RAIDing some USB thumb drives together. Might actually be a good way to get practice with your choice of RAID software for cheap, come to think of it.

I recall reading a great intro to ZFS article that did this! They had like 16 USB drives!
Post reply on HN