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

totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net

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

#111

Post by tomxor »

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.

Yup, even old computers that booted off floppy drives like the Atari ST and Amiga would often just load the entire data and program into memory, since their memory size was usually larger than the floppy disk. Same for the games, a lot of the loading at the beginning was to do with simply loading the entire disk into memory...

basically system memory size vs block device size was the opposite way around of today... then again people could and did have many individual floppy disks.

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

#112

Post by Aeolun »

tomxor wrote: post #111
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.

Yup, even old computers that booted off floppy drives like the Atari ST and Amiga would often just load the entire data and program into memory, since their memory size was usually larger than the floppy disk. Same for the games, a lot of the loading at the beginning was to do with simply loading the entire disk into memory... basically system memory size vs block device size was the opposite way around of today... t…

If we take any portable media as the comparison, the largest I know of is 50GB for a blueray disk, that’s still something you can ‘almost’ load into 32gb of memory (if your OS and Teams app didn’t take 16gb of course).

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

#114

Post by koverstreet »

rascul wrote: post #106
koverstreet wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, no. There is no general block layer cache - the closest thing is the page cache, which is at the file level.

Are you the Kent Overstreet working on bcachefs? If so, I've been watching it and looking forward for it to get into the kernel. Keep up the good work. I'll have a donation coming in a little while.

The one and only :)

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

#116

Post by treve »

tomxor wrote: post #111
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.

Yup, even old computers that booted off floppy drives like the Atari ST and Amiga would often just load the entire data and program into memory, since their memory size was usually larger than the floppy disk. Same for the games, a lot of the loading at the beginning was to do with simply loading the entire disk into memory... basically system memory size vs block device size was the opposite way around of today... t…

Is this true? This feels hard to imagine that computers would load the entire diskette into memory. Apparently the Atari ST had up to 4MB of RAM.

I can imagine many programs doing this though.

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

#119

Post by aetherspawn »

tomxor wrote: post #111
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.

Yup, even old computers that booted off floppy drives like the Atari ST and Amiga would often just load the entire data and program into memory, since their memory size was usually larger than the floppy disk. Same for the games, a lot of the loading at the beginning was to do with simply loading the entire disk into memory... basically system memory size vs block device size was the opposite way around of today... t…

You can even use mdadm to add a ramdisk as a single disk RAID array with write-through to a physical disk.

Every time you reboot, it will repair the array.

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

#120

Post by EvgeniyZh »

Aeolun wrote: post #112
tomxor wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, even old computers that booted off floppy drives like the Atari ST and Amiga would often just load the entire data and program into memory, since their memory size was usually larger than the floppy disk. Same for the games, a lot of the loading at the beginning was to do with simply loading the entire disk into memory... basically system memory size vs block device size was the opposite way around of today... t…

If we take any portable media as the comparison, the largest I know of is 50GB for a blueray disk, that’s still something you can ‘almost’ load into 32gb of memory (if your OS and Teams app didn’t take 16gb of course).

I think thumb drives get up to several TB this days
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