What’s the weirdest thing one can raid together these days? Maybe a bunch of raspberry pi picos?
I would say for sure LTO tape drives.
Oh that's a good one
Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
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Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
#32What’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…
I wonder if you did that same calculation today, what percent of the speed of light would the edge of that disk be moving...I miss that kind of humor.
Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
#33What’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.
Virtual machines with many virtual disks would be much easier, or maybe I’m just lazy…
Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
#34What’s the weirdest thing one can raid together these days? Maybe a bunch of raspberry pi picos?
Read once about an iPod shuffle array…
Also on wired: https://www.wired.com/2005/02/ipod-shuffles-m/
Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
#35Really miss stuff like this from back in the early computing days. One time we used MS Backup to copy Warcraft 1 from my friends computer to my own. Took like 80 floppy disks!
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?
> 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?
Did ever your hard drive died because you shut down your computer cleanly, discharged static electricity, removed the disk without jolting it, and installed to another computer with the same care?
I lost a couple of drives that way.
Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
#36What’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.
> but I've thought about RAIDing some USB thumb drives together
I had a netbook with an irritatingly slow (and a bit small) eMMC drive for its main storage. I had a pair of microSD cards lying around that were faster for many IO patterns, so I bought a third and strung the three together in mini-USB readers (like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001JPPQS6/) and run Linux off that using its 3-drive RAID10 support. Leaving a bit of space on each for a smaller RAID1 array for /boot (booting direct form RAID10 didn't work), IIRC the 3x8Gb SD cards give a small touch under 12GiB, larger than the built-in 8Gb, and it was significantly faster (more so than I expected). The slow eMMC got used as backup storage, syncing copies of bits from /home and config from elsewhere, so I could rebuild easily should two cards die at the same time.
The main problem with this arrangement was that is consumed all three of the USB ports, if I wanted to access another drive locally rather than over wireless I'd have to shut down and reboot with at least one of the drives hung off a small USB hub. For some reason it didn't work with one of the drives in the built-in SD reader (the arrays would always start in a degraded state on boot) which I never got around to looking into working around (perhaps a kernel module was missing from initrd that was needed to be able to access the hardware?).
I experimented with RAID5 and RAID0 also. 5 gave a bit more space but was a lot slower for write operations, at least in artificial benchmarks, I assume due to read-before-write issues and the machine having little RAM spare for cache that might mitigate this. 0 did not give notable read performance benefits (though measurably faster writes, and obviously gave much more space), perhaps all the ports running of a single internal USB2 hub was a limiting factor.
Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I wonder if you did that same calculation today, what percent of the speed of light would the edge of that disk be moving...I miss that kind of humor.
It's easy enough to repeat, but I'd be leaking sensitive info that way. Sorry :/
Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
#38I 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? I assume it didn’t make money. I have fond memories of reading PC magazines front to back in the 90s but they’re all gone now. The audience has gone online, to a hundred different blogs or YouTube channels or whatever.
Me too. I was using public transport a lot and at one of the train stations there was a bookstore which had lots of different magazines. I bought and read a lot of them. Those where good times. I anticipated the next issues of the magazines and if it was e.g. a computer games magazine I was often hyped for the upcoming games and the demos that where sometimes included.
Now I sometimes still go to such bookstores but those magazines have lost their appeal since I can get all of the information from the internet, sometimes even on the website of the magazine. It's unfortunately also quite overwhelming.
Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
#39What’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.
On Linux, you can expose raw image files as storage devices using "loop devices" - the "losetup" command will turn any flat file into an attached storage device as /dev/loop*, you can then run your RAID of choice on that.
By the way, if you want to play with ZFS, it supports using flat files as backing "devices" naturally, so you don't even need to fake a drive using loop devices.
Re: Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
#40Earlier 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?
> 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? Did ever your hard drive died because you shut down your computer cleanly, discharged static electricity, removed the disk without jolting it, and installed to another computer with the same care? I lost a couple of drives that way.
Remember the days before auto park? You would have to tell the drive to safely park the head before you could move it.