I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives

Post by ericbarrett » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

kjellsbells wrote: post #94

wahern wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I finally bought a USB drive to read an old 3.5" floppy from the late '90s on which I had archived my e-mail messages before moving away to college. I completely forgot about write protection (as well as atime write-backs). I managed to read a surprising amount of data off of the disk, but I think less than if I had remembered to write-protect the disk before inserting it into the drive. The files wer…

So rare to see ppl writing about sync. sync;sync;halt was once a legit way to shut down ;)

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

Zachsa999 wrote: post #62

Site seems to be really slow currently.

Post by asveikau » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 11:21 PM UTC

Vogtinator wrote: post #52

asveikau wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of the block layer cache there's also the namei cache for filename to inode lookups, I'm not sure if that covers a file not found case or just a success path, but it may apply here too.

Yep, that's called a "negative dentry".

Post by kalleboo » Sat, Jul 16, 2022, 12:00 AM UTC

VLM wrote: post #55

Maursault wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RAID0 is for speed only In this case, the theoretical maximum bandwidth is 24M Bit /s. The problem is the old, slow usb bottleneck. I'm not sure how much faster, probably hundreds of bps rather than under 24, but a faster RAID0 rig would be to instead have 30x Mac G4 Digital Audios connected via gigabit switch, and share then RAID0 the internal floppies. It would also have whatever advantage running an XGrid PPC cl…

I don't know about that BW claim. Back when mp3 was new and computers usually had floppy drives I did the obvious and mp3 bitrates above 64K or so tended to stutter and significantly below 64K did not stutter. Something like voice encoded at 32K sounded at least as good as a phone and played back off a 1.44 floppy and IIRC that was about the best that could be done. You will probably be surprised how long an audio re…

Post by ehPReth » Sat, Jul 16, 2022, 12:25 AM UTC

LarryPage wrote: post #15

Nextgrid wrote: post #3

I'd expect the vast majority of IO requests to be served from the kernel's IO cache (we're talking 30 * 1.44MBs here so just under 50MB, trivial for even an old computer to hold in RAM), thus I wouldn't be surprised for it to be very fast and reliable as long as he sticks to read-only workloads - those would never actually touch the floppies beyond the initial read.

I did watch -n 1 'sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' to try and get around it. I think it's working, because boy is it noisy lol