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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)

#51

Post by scoot »

bayindirh wrote: post #35
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?

> 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.

Meh. We had a PC in the electronics lab circa 1990 that ran perfectly happily with no case on either the PC or the hard-drive - spinning platters exposed.

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

#52

Post by M95D »

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'm doing it right now on a router with OpenWrt and btrfs!

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

#53

Post by tenebrisalietum »

When I first learned about USB "On The Go", and discovered a friend's Android phone had the feature, I connected a USB floppy drive to the phone. I used a micro USB to type A hub that I had around for my Pi Zero.

Totally worked. Android called it an SD card in its UI but I was able to read/write files to it.

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

#54

Post by bayindirh »

xxs wrote: post #49
bayindirh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was probably too young to remember these days, however probably a couple of my disks didn't have the feature. The disks I lost were 6GiB and 30GiB models, both were autoparking.

The park thing happened before the GB era of the hard drives

I started with a 119MB Samsung, on a computer with a BIOS supporting custom low-level formatting of the drive according to CYL/SEC/HEAD parameters.

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

#55

Post by bayindirh »

scoot wrote: post #51
bayindirh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Meh. We had a PC in the electronics lab circa 1990 that ran perfectly happily with no case on either the PC or the hard-drive - spinning platters exposed.

Well, in 90s things went from happy to snappy in an instant randomly. Yours beating Murphy that consistently tells me that it's a very lucky system.

Maybe blessed by a Polish Priest? [0]

[0]: https://polishpriests.tumblr.com/

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

#56

Post by M95D »

o11c wrote: post #9
eby wrote: post #5

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

Beware that bad sectors probably exist on those, and modern filesystems (which falsely assume the hardware will do automagical remapping) make it hard to run `badblocks`. From the fsck man pages, only ext2, ext3, ext4, and reiserfs support it. I hope that `btrfs-convert` deals with it correctly, but you must not ever run `btrfs balance` or delete the backup (it won't waste space if it was a fresh FS). And if further…

btrfs doesn't support bad blocks. It's written in the documentation.

From experience I can tell you that most usb sticks fail while reading back data by returning bad data, not an error or timeout, and the defective sectors aren't always the same (internal remap to wear leveling might be the cause of that).

Advice: Do md-raid0 on half of them, md-raid0 on the other half, and btrfs raid1 on the two md devices. If you want to exceed 25MB/s, use different USB controllers, not different ports on the same hub.

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

#58

Post by NikkiA »

xxs wrote: post #49
bayindirh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was probably too young to remember these days, however probably a couple of my disks didn't have the feature. The disks I lost were 6GiB and 30GiB models, both were autoparking.

The park thing happened before the GB era of the hard drives

It was mostly only ST-506 MFM and RLL drives, almost everything parked automatically by the time IDE drives passed the 100MB size.

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

#59

Post by cylinder714 »

__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...

From 2009, what I think was a famous video on which some kids in the UK put together a 6-gigabyte RAID with 24 256-gigabyte Samsung drives: https://youtu.be/26enkCzkJHQ
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