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

wired.com

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

#71

Post by phil21 »

__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 had grand plans to make a giant USB ZFS volume from tradeshow thumb drives in bulk.

It lasted a couple evenings while I bumped into apparently every Linux USB driver/chipset issue possible trying to drive a couple hundred drives via cheapo AliExpress USB hubs.

It was fun times, but even more useless than I originally thought it would be. It was amusing to get >1GBps for a minute or two across 256 crappy thumb drives though!

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

#72

Post by firebat45 »

khazhoux wrote: post #28
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.

And so it was, and will be, for perpetuity.

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

#73

Post by jfengel »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #46
afavour wrote: 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.

Wired has always been cheap. They'll give it away for free with the tiniest bit of effort.

Wired delivers ads to a market segment with a lot of disposable income. They've got the ability and inclination to buy a lot of luxury goods and services. Wired charges at all only so that you believe that getting it into your house was your idea rather than theirs.

Five bucks is less than they spend on printing and delivering, never mind actual writing. A lot of the writing is pretty poor, though they also have a long history of discovering and promoting some real writing talent.

So it's a pretty good bargain. It just helps to be aware that you're the product more than you are the client.

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

#74

Post by jfengel »

khazhoux wrote: post #28
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.

Wired was started in the 1990s, a time that was optimistic even by the standards of your generic "the past was always better" heuristic. It was so optimistic that they actually debated the merits of paying off the US national debt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/business/greenspan-foreca...

In the 1990s, Wired was not merely "infectious and enthusiastic". It was gullibly gung-ho, and ugly as hell. I used a heuristic: if something appeared on the cover of Wired, it was either a fait accompli, or going to fail within a year.

So yeah, 1990s Wired was genuinely different. But often not in a good way.

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

#75

Post by dragonwriter »

jfengel wrote: post #73
hnuser123456 wrote: post #46

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.

Wired has always been cheap. They'll give it away for free with the tiniest bit of effort. Wired delivers ads to a market segment with a lot of disposable income. They've got the ability and inclination to buy a lot of luxury goods and services. Wired charges at all only so that you believe that getting it into your house was your idea rather than theirs. Five bucks is less than they spend on printing and delivering,…

> Wired charges at all only so that you believe that getting it into your house was your idea rather than theirs.

No, they charge at all because people who pay for print ads pay more based on paid circulation (you get people who pay for ads in free publications, but they pay less), probably on the basis that paid subscribers are likely to actually read the publication it and not just pick it up to use as dropcloths for painting or kindling for fires.

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

#76

Post by r2_pilot »

xxs wrote: post #48
thedougd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the days before auto park? You would have to tell the drive to safely park the head before you could move it.

Indeed, plus the jumper switches for master/slave mode

I never had enough jumpers at the time(early in my computer explorations), and hoarded them like gold up until around 2007 or 2008 when I finally had plenty from old spare parts.

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

#77

Post by mbirth »

dale_glass wrote: post #27

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.

The LS-120 drives were compatible with bog standard 3.5” disks and could read them at a higher speed.

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

#78

Post by khazhoux »

firebat45 wrote: post #72
khazhoux wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And so it was, and will be, for perpetuity.

c.f. The Simpsons, SNL, ...

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

#79

Post by noman-land »

jrmg wrote: post #16
noman-land wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?" I reckon it was Conde Nast.

Wired’s been owned by Condé Nast since 1998, and wired.com since 2006.

So you're saying in their tenure of ownership they turned it into this?

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

#80

Post by M95D »

o11c wrote: post #65
M95D wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Doesn't support bad blocks at all.

Bad blocks don't count as allocated unless they are newly discovered - data should be moved asap if it's still recoverable. An allocated block with nothing in it is an error.

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