USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004)

He's not wrong, Riviera is pretty groovy. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvjLW0i-2Ebq9iQoZ-m2R...

The 8-Bit Guy (formerly iBook Guy) created an array using USB sticks: https://youtu.be/dougISKs2vQ

Action Retro has a video with floppies: https://youtu.be/1hc52_PWeU8

He also references a MacWorld article with Daniel's array: https://www.macworld.com/article/165663/floppyraid.html

I have done it with usb floppy drives under openbsd, I am sure it is just as trivial under linux but I had obsd and a bunch of usb floppy drives at my disposal.

    #it has been a few years I don't remember if it works with bare drives or if you need a disklabel on each floppy
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    #the raid will show up now, check dmesg
    disklabel -E sd5
    newfs /dev/sd5a
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy/
    umount /mnt/floppy
    bioctl -d sd5
    #after inserting all floppies reassemble the raid
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy
    

I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

One day in what was probably sullen resentment that openbsd has no equivalent to DRBD I assembled a raid on iscsi drives, that is, initiate 5 iscsi sessions to independent hosts then assemble a raid with them. and you can imagine my surprise when it very nearly worked, I could read and write just fine. The part that did not work was drive failure. My guess is that iscsid did not fail a drive in a way that softraid understood. so a drive failure just lead to everything hanging.

Not floppies but I clearly remember some Sun Microsystems video demonstrating ZFS where some guys dressed as over the top engineers randomly disconnecting USB thumb drives that were part of a pool to show the file system resilience.

Was going to post the Action Retro attempt. Latency is abysmal, yet it's still a glorious thing to see it (kinda) work at all.

Need to see if someone can hack together RAID on cassettes on an old Apple II