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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)

#61

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.

If you want to get such practice, creating filesystems inside files on your disk and then mounting them is more convenient.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/85977/how-do-i-create-a-file... should, I think, work on any Unix-like system.

On the Mac, create .dmg files for extra convenience.

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

#62

What’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/

Here's the original blog post on those shuffles[1]. Funny enough, I remember reading about this exact post in 2005, that photo of the four shuffles plugged into the USB hub hits my nostalgia buttons.

[1]: https://wrightthisway.com/index.php/2005/02/03/ipod_shuffle_...

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

#64
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I recently re-started a subscription to paper copies of wired mag. Apparently they just had a chief editor change. It was absurdly cheap, like $5 for a year. I think Conde Nast are just trying to keep some paper subscribers.

Every once in a while the magazines just start appearing at my house without me subscribing. My best guess for that is they want more readers in my zip code to sell ads against.

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

#65
post #56
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Btrfs doesn't directly support bad blocks. But since the conversion is supposed to use only "free space" that's presumably excluding bad blocks (which are presumably counted as allocated).

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently re-started a subscription to paper copies of wired mag. Apparently they just had a chief editor change. It was absurdly cheap, like $5 for a year. I think Conde Nast are just trying to keep some paper subscribers.

Every once in a while the magazines just start appearing at my house without me subscribing. My best guess for that is they want more readers in my zip code to sell ads against.

Same deal. We stopped subscribing to Bon Appetit, moved to a new house, and a year and a half later they started showing up again. Now I just have something new to throw into recycling as soon as it arrives and I can’t get them to stop because I’m not actually a subscriber.

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

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :/

No worries, I completely understand!

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

#68
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

remember laplink?

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

haven't thought of that program in decades, thank you. First time I learned about a null modem cable and just scraping the surface of RS-232. I also remember using crossover cables so I could network 2 computers on a high-schooler's budget.
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