7 ms·
Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
- gnabgib 3y ago(2009)
- eep_social 3y agoA more hopeful year.
- gosub100 3y agoThats the one year I decided to go AMD and ended up snagging their worst-ever "phenom" line of processor.
- accrual 3y agoThis would be fun to try with OpenBSD's softraid.
- somat 3y agoCan confirm, it is fun, also fun was raid5 using iscsi drives, which surprisingly almost worked. Almost in that while I could assemble and access the raid unit, it behaved very poorly(hard hangs) on drive failure. But it was fun, sort of like a super redneck network distributed filesystem.
- johnzim 3y agoI clicked the link after reading just the first 4 words of the title. I didn't see the year it was written until I had closed the link - perhaps it was added after the initial submission. After reading the article through I was struck by the tone. It was a breath of fresh air - so optimistic and enthusiastic and not in the least bit self-important or unduly serious. It made me excited to read more! When I saw the '(2009)' flag I suddenly felt a pang of grief. Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?
- noman-land 3y ago"Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine?" I reckon it was Conde Nast.
- jrmg 3y agoWired’s been owned by Condé Nast since 1998, and wired.com since 2006.
- noman-land 3y agoSo you're saying in their tenure of ownership they turned it into this?
- afavour 3y ago> Whatever happened to that infectious, enthusiastic incarnation of wired magazine? I assume it didn’t make money. I have fond memories of reading PC magazines front to back in the 90s but they’re all gone now. The audience has gone online, to a hundred different blogs or YouTube channels or whatever.
- katzenversteher 3y agoMe too. I was using public transport a lot and at one of the train stations there was a bookstore which had lots of different magazines. I bought and read a lot of them. Those where good times. I anticipated the next issues of the magazines and if it was e.g. a computer games magazine I was often hyped for the upcoming games and the demos that where sometimes included. Now I sometimes still go to such bookstores but those magazines have lost their appeal since I can get all of the information from the internet, sometimes even on the website of the magazine. It's unfortunately also quite overwhelming.
- hnuser123456 3y agoI recently re-started a subscription to paper copies of wired mag. Apparently they just had a chief editor change. It was absurdly cheap, like $5 for a year. I think Conde Nast are just trying to keep some paper subscribers.
- eby 3y agoFinally, a use for that drawer full of 1 GB USB drives!
- o11c 3y agoBeware that bad sectors probably exist on those, and modern filesystems (which falsely assume the hardware will do automagical remapping) make it hard to run `badblocks`. From the fsck man pages, only ext2, ext3, ext4, and reiserfs support it. I hope that `btrfs-convert` deals with it correctly, but you must not ever run `btrfs balance` or delete the backup (it won't waste space if it was a fresh FS). And if further bad blocks develop you'll have to redo this all from scratch.
- M95D 3y agobtrfs doesn't support bad blocks. It's written in the documentation. From experience I can tell you that most usb sticks fail while reading back data by returning bad data, not an error or timeout, and the defective sectors aren't always the same (internal remap to wear leveling might be the cause of that). Advice: Do md-raid0 on half of them, md-raid0 on the other half, and btrfs raid1 on the two md devices. If you want to exceed 25MB/s, use different USB controllers, not different ports on the same hub.
- o11c 3y agoBtrfs doesn't directly support bad blocks. But since the conversion is supposed to use only "free space" that's presumably excluding bad blocks (which are presumably counted as allocated).
- M95D 3y agoDoesn't support bad blocks at all. Bad blocks don't count as allocated unless they are newly discovered - data should be moved asap if it's still recoverable. An allocated block with nothing in it is an error.
- __lm__ 3y ago
- par 3y agoReally miss stuff like this from back in the early computing days. One time we used MS Backup to copy Warcraft 1 from my friends computer to my own. Took like 80 floppy disks!
- eru 3y agoThat sounds like you copied the CD version via a floppy disk? It would have probably been faster to put your friends hard disk into your computer for a few minutes and copy directly from disk to disk?
- mock-possum 3y agoDisk2Disk It’s the computer version of frottage
- woleium 3y agoremember laplink?
- iforgotpassword 3y agoI remember interlnk. It seemed like magic the first time I used it.
- gosub100 3y agohaven't thought of that program in decades, thank you. First time I learned about a null modem cable and just scraping the surface of RS-232. I also remember using crossover cables so I could network 2 computers on a high-schooler's budget.
- thedougd 3y agoIdeally with the parallel cable.
- bayindirh 3y ago> It would have probably been faster to put your friends hard disk into your computer for a few minutes and copy directly from disk to disk? Did ever your hard drive died because you shut down your computer cleanly, discharged static electricity, removed the disk without jolting it, and installed to another computer with the same care? I lost a couple of drives that way.
- riscy 3y agoI was really hoping for a video with sound. I’d love to hear a cacophony of floppy drives saving that .mp3 !
- kmeisthax 3y agoActionRetro has you covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGWpGMrroi8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGWpGMrroi8
- slim 3y agoDEVO - Uncontrollable Urge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTNGg0Tj5Aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTNGg0Tj5Aw
- buildbot 3y agoWhat’s the weirdest thing one can raid together these days? Maybe a bunch of raspberry pi picos?
- smueller1234 3y agoI would say for sure LTO tape drives.
- buildbot 3y agoOh that's a good one
- M95D 3y agoEver heard of Seagate Direct Tape Access? "With Seagate Direct Tape Access, users see the tape device as a logical drive letter from within Windows 95 Explorer, Windows 3.x File Manager, or any other Windows application, similar to a hard drive or CD-ROM. Files and directories can be moved to and from the tape device with drag-and-drop operations." https://www.eetimes.com/seagate-software-ships-powerful-new-seagate-direct-tape-access-for-windows-3-x-and-windows-95/ https://www.eetimes.com/seagate-software-ships-powerful-new-... ... from a time when new software was better than old software.
- smueller1234 3y agoSorry for a second response to the same comment. While on the topic of entertainment, consider the opposite of putting erasure codes on many weird devices! Years ago, some colleagues and I did the napkin math over lunch to estimate what a single hard drive would look like that could store all of Google's data. This was for a humorous internal talk. The linear speeds of the outer sectors were enough to leave the solar system (not just higher than Earth's escape velocity). Good laughs were had, I think.
- buildbot 3y agoI wonder if you did that same calculation today, what percent of the speed of light would the edge of that disk be moving...I miss that kind of humor.
- dale_glass 3y agoFun fact: There's also 2X speed floppy drives, and maybe even higher. So this can be improved further with the right drives. I believe they were mainly used in things like photo cameras, during the short period of time when photo cameras used floppies to store stuff, and the slow write speed was a bottleneck.
- mbirth 3y agoThe LS-120 drives were compatible with bog standard 3.5” disks and could read them at a higher speed.
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoWhen I first learned about USB "On The Go", and discovered a friend's Android phone had the feature, I connected a USB floppy drive to the phone. I used a micro USB to type A hub that I had around for my Pi Zero. Totally worked. Android called it an SD card in its UI but I was able to read/write files to it.
- causality0 3y agoGods do I miss the satisfying clunk of inserting a 3.5 inch floppy disk into a drive.
- cormorant 3y agoOriginal with more detail, posted in 2003 or earlier: https://web.archive.org/web/20030601111810/http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20030601111810/http://ohlssonvox... WIRED picked this up in 2009 for some reason.
- dghughes 3y agoI'm disappointed it was not named FRAID! Or better yet A: FRAID!
- dhosek 3y agoThe latter wouldn’t apply since he did it on a Mac.