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I thought about trying this with LTO drives, to have a ridiculously slow but also ridiculously high capacity raid, but sadly the LTO tape decks are a bit too expensive for this experiment.
U320 SCSI LTO-5 can be had cheap. Nobody wants them these days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
U320 SCSI LTO-5 can be had cheap. Nobody wants them these days.
Yeah though that wouldn’t have a lot of storage, only 1.5 terabytes per tape. A new 2TB SSD is only about $100 and can easily be connected via usb.
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 /m…
Yeah:)
> Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
- Doug Gwyn
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah though that wouldn’t have a lot of storage, only 1.5 terabytes per tape. A new 2TB SSD is only about $100 and can easily be connected via usb.
Yeah but who knows if the data will be there in 10 years on the SSD? For tapes, it's about 20-30 years.
That was my big problem with the economics of tape. the drives are expensive and don't really last that long. At some scale factor tape makes sense, but it is larger than you would naively think.
As there is no good solution for personal scale long term archive type storage, I have sort of given up on it. Actual long term archives take the form of human readable printed documents. However this is very low density. so only the most important stuff. long term bulk storage is live, hard drives based arrays and backups, requiring an active maintainer it will die when I do, but no great loss, it is mostly junk anyhow.
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 /m…
Agree! My first thought while reading the article was that it would be very easy to do this on OpenBSD as well, either with USB floppies or normal 34-pin drives as well.
OpenBSD's softraid stack doesn't care much about what the underlying hardware is as long as it looks like a disk and talks like a disk.
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.
One of my 'friends' is very capitalist and it makes him actually angry that people spend so much time on something that doesn't make money. I find it sad that he doesn't understand the concept of fun. And he has plenty of money.
This feels like a storage solution that needs a "|0| days since last data loss" sign. Take the reliability of floppies under continuous read write cycles and divide it by 5?
Now if you are stripping... Well... then sure the data loss is your own fault, you have taken the R out of RAID.
This feels like a storage solution that needs a "|0| days since last data loss" sign. Take the reliability of floppies under continuous read write cycles and divide it by 5?
The whole point is to avoid data loss, floppies are notoriously prone to failure, if you can do raid on floppy, you can survive loss of a disk. Now if you are stripping... Well... then sure the data loss is your own fault, you have taken the R out of RAID.