and..... the most unsurprising thing ever.....
I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
151–160 of 161 posts
Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, is that the one with like 10 1" fans spinning at 8,000 RPM, so that it sounds like a Harrier jet coming in for a landing?
> 8,000 RPM Usually it's way, way more: https://store.supermicro.com/server-accessories/fans.html?fa...
Who wouldn’t want that in their living room?
Oof.
Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
#153I'm surprised this actually still works. As far as I remember those floppies were super unreliable.
Though this may have been caused by me being in school and having to buy crappy white label ones. Couldn't afford those fancy imation ones with all the games I copied lol.
Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
#154Earlier 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…
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.
One disk, sure. 30? Well, the parent made a very biased interpretation of history, depending on what one means by "old". I remember running Linux on a 4 MB RAM computer, and how good upgrading to 8 MB felt.
Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. The cache is at the block layer, not the file/directory layer. So the filesystem will look up the directory structure, which will be cached.
Actually, no. There is no general block layer cache - the closest thing is the page cache, which is at the file level.
I guess the real question there is, does a directory count as a file for the purposes of this discussion.
It seems necessary that the blocks storing the directory entries are cached too. Otherwise every non-existent lookup (that doesn't hit a negative dentry) would hit disk, each separately.
So yeah, the page cache is keyed by file, but the system should still cache the directory structure.
Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
#156Earlier 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 ;)
There was a time when the sync CLI exited before the work was done, so you actually didn't want sync;sync;halt, typing it as separate commands gave it the right amount of time to complete.
Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still backed by block layer cache for (hopefully) quick response regardless of outcome
What block layer cache?
I think I was wrong, typed too quickly. There’s (potentially) a file buffer block cache available, but that’s not for caching raw disk blocks, but filesystem blocks of content.
Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
#158Well, did we just hug it to death? Hope the floppies are doing fine... Look forward to an update
Turns out it was not built to handle the load of a "frontpage of hackernews" situation, hehe.
I doubt most "home" level servers could unless they were serving up nothing but a short text file.
Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
#159I'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.
It depends on what you mean for 'old'. At the beginning of 90s even 16MBytes were pretty a luxury.
Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives
#160Well guess not anymore, because the article is down?