4 ms·

Indeed - I remember hearing about someone setting up a 5-disk RAID set of floppy drives, but 16 seems a little excessive :)

• rwmj 14y ago
  That would be USB. The floppy controller on AT-era PCs I'm pretty sure would only support 2 drives. ObStory: Minix + floppy drives taught me a valuable lesson about compression. In Minix there was a very useful command called "vol" which let you split the input over many floppy disk "volumes", eg: <some huge input> | vol -w 360 /dev/fd0 would split the input, prompting you to change the floppy between each 360 kilobyte disk. I chose this command to back up my Minix system: tar cf - / | compress | vol -w 360 /dev/fd0 Unfortunately when I came to read it back, I found that floppy disk #5 (of about 15) had a bad sector, rendering the entire remainder of the backup useless.
  • martinced 14y ago
    Way before I got into PC / Linux I was into C64 and Amiga piracy as a kid. When we had stuff that needed more than two or three disks we'd use additional disks as a redundancy method. I don't remember all the redundancy details but basically if you have one additional disk you could have any one of the disk fully failing and you'd still be able to get back your data. I'm pretty sure that there was a command-line to do the same ; )
    • gosub 14y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
  • DanBC 14y ago
    >That would be USB. It was USB. USB floppy drives. (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/five-disk-floppy-raid-4mb-of-blistering-fast-storage/ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/five-disk-floppy-raid...)