4 ms·

What’s the weirdest thing one can raid together these days? Maybe a bunch of raspberry pi picos?

by buildbot 3y ago

smueller1234 3y ago
I would say for sure LTO tape drives.
- buildbot 3y ago
  Oh that's a good one
- M95D 3y ago
  Ever 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 ago
Sorry 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 ago
  I 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.
  - smueller1234 3y ago
    It's easy enough to repeat, but I'd be leaking sensitive info that way. Sorry :/
    - buildbot 3y ago
      No worries, I completely understand!
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Not that weird, but I've thought about RAIDing some USB thumb drives together. Might actually be a good way to get practice with your choice of RAID software for cheap, come to think of it.
- buildbot 3y ago
  I recall reading a great intro to ZFS article that did this! They had like 16 USB drives!
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  Virtual machines with many virtual disks would be much easier, or maybe I’m just lazy…
  - _joel 3y ago
    loopback devices would be even easier... but not as fun
- dspillett 3y ago
  > but I've thought about RAIDing some USB thumb drives together I had a netbook with an irritatingly slow (and a bit small) eMMC drive for its main storage. I had a pair of microSD cards lying around that were faster for many IO patterns, so I bought a third and strung the three together in mini-USB readers (like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001JPPQS6/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001JPPQS6/) and run Linux off that using its 3-drive RAID10 support. Leaving a bit of space on each for a smaller RAID1 array for /boot (booting direct form RAID10 didn't work), IIRC the 3x8Gb SD cards give a small touch under 12GiB, larger than the built-in 8Gb, and it was significantly faster (more so than I expected). The slow eMMC got used as backup storage, syncing copies of bits from /home and config from elsewhere, so I could rebuild easily should two cards die at the same time. The main problem with this arrangement was that is consumed all three of the USB ports, if I wanted to access another drive locally rather than over wireless I'd have to shut down and reboot with at least one of the drives hung off a small USB hub. For some reason it didn't work with one of the drives in the built-in SD reader (the arrays would always start in a degraded state on boot) which I never got around to looking into working around (perhaps a kernel module was missing from initrd that was needed to be able to access the hardware?). I experimented with RAID5 and RAID0 also. 5 gave a bit more space but was a lot slower for write operations, at least in artificial benchmarks, I assume due to read-before-write issues and the machine having little RAM spare for cache that might mitigate this. 0 did not give notable read performance benefits (though measurably faster writes, and obviously gave much more space), perhaps all the ports running of a single internal USB2 hub was a limiting factor.
pcardoso 3y ago
Read once about an iPod shuffle array… Also on wired: https://www.wired.com/2005/02/ipod-shuffles-m/ https://www.wired.com/2005/02/ipod-shuffles-m/
- jkubicek 3y ago
  Here's the original blog post on those shuffles[1]. Funny enough, I remember reading about this exact post in 2005, that photo of the four shuffles plugged into the USB hub hits my nostalgia buttons. [1]: https://wrightthisway.com/index.php/2005/02/03/ipod_shuffle_ra_1/ https://wrightthisway.com/index.php/2005/02/03/ipod_shuffle_...
kijin 3y ago
Optical disks might be fun. Try DVD±RW or DVD-RAM.

What’s the weirdest thing one can raid together these days? Maybe a bunch of raspberry pi picos?

smueller1234 3y ago

I would say for sure LTO tape drives.

buildbot 3y ago
Oh that's a good one
M95D 3y ago
Ever 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 ago

Sorry 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 ago
I 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.
- smueller1234 3y ago
  It's easy enough to repeat, but I'd be leaking sensitive info that way. Sorry :/
  - buildbot 3y ago
    No worries, I completely understand!

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

Not that weird, but I've thought about RAIDing some USB thumb drives together. Might actually be a good way to get practice with your choice of RAID software for cheap, come to think of it.

buildbot 3y ago
I recall reading a great intro to ZFS article that did this! They had like 16 USB drives!
hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
Virtual machines with many virtual disks would be much easier, or maybe I’m just lazy…
- _joel 3y ago
  loopback devices would be even easier... but not as fun
dspillett 3y ago
> but I've thought about RAIDing some USB thumb drives together I had a netbook with an irritatingly slow (and a bit small) eMMC drive for its main storage. I had a pair of microSD cards lying around that were faster for many IO patterns, so I bought a third and strung the three together in mini-USB readers (like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001JPPQS6/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B001JPPQS6/) and run Linux off that using its 3-drive RAID10 support. Leaving a bit of space on each for a smaller RAID1 array for /boot (booting direct form RAID10 didn't work), IIRC the 3x8Gb SD cards give a small touch under 12GiB, larger than the built-in 8Gb, and it was significantly faster (more so than I expected). The slow eMMC got used as backup storage, syncing copies of bits from /home and config from elsewhere, so I could rebuild easily should two cards die at the same time. The main problem with this arrangement was that is consumed all three of the USB ports, if I wanted to access another drive locally rather than over wireless I'd have to shut down and reboot with at least one of the drives hung off a small USB hub. For some reason it didn't work with one of the drives in the built-in SD reader (the arrays would always start in a degraded state on boot) which I never got around to looking into working around (perhaps a kernel module was missing from initrd that was needed to be able to access the hardware?). I experimented with RAID5 and RAID0 also. 5 gave a bit more space but was a lot slower for write operations, at least in artificial benchmarks, I assume due to read-before-write issues and the machine having little RAM spare for cache that might mitigate this. 0 did not give notable read performance benefits (though measurably faster writes, and obviously gave much more space), perhaps all the ports running of a single internal USB2 hub was a limiting factor.

pcardoso 3y ago

Read once about an iPod shuffle array… Also on wired: https://www.wired.com/2005/02/ipod-shuffles-m/ https://www.wired.com/2005/02/ipod-shuffles-m/

jkubicek 3y ago
Here's the original blog post on those shuffles[1]. Funny enough, I remember reading about this exact post in 2005, that photo of the four shuffles plugged into the USB hub hits my nostalgia buttons. [1]: https://wrightthisway.com/index.php/2005/02/03/ipod_shuffle_ra_1/ https://wrightthisway.com/index.php/2005/02/03/ipod_shuffle_...

kijin 3y ago

Optical disks might be fun. Try DVD±RW or DVD-RAM.