Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009)
wired.com
wired.com
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?
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.
Wired delivers ads to a market segment with a lot of disposable income. They've got the ability and inclination to buy a lot of luxury goods and services. Wired charges at all only so that you believe that getting it into your house was your idea rather than theirs.
Five bucks is less than they spend on printing and delivering, never mind actual writing. A lot of the writing is pretty poor, though they also have a long history of discovering and promoting some real writing talent.
So it's a pretty good bargain. It just helps to be aware that you're the product more than you are the client.
No, they charge at all because people who pay for print ads pay more based on paid circulation (you get people who pay for ads in free publications, but they pay less), probably on the basis that paid subscribers are likely to actually read the publication it and not just pick it up to use as dropcloths for painting or kindling for fires.
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.
And not just Wired. It seems everything was more optimistic and exciting 10 years before whenever you’re reading this comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/business/greenspan-foreca...
In the 1990s, Wired was not merely "infectious and enthusiastic". It was gullibly gung-ho, and ugly as hell. I used a heuristic: if something appeared on the cover of Wired, it was either a fait accompli, or going to fail within a year.
So yeah, 1990s Wired was genuinely different. But often not in a good way.
I reckon it was Conde Nast.
WIRED picked this up in 2009 for some reason.
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.
Maybe blessed by a Polish Priest? [0]
It’s the computer version of frottage
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.
Also on wired: https://www.wired.com/2005/02/ipod-shuffles-m/
[1]: https://wrightthisway.com/index.php/2005/02/03/ipod_shuffle_...
"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-...
... from a time when new software was better than old software.
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/) 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.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/85977/how-do-i-create-a-file... should, I think, work on any Unix-like system.
On the Mac, create .dmg files for extra convenience.
By the way, if you want to play with ZFS, it supports using flat files as backing "devices" naturally, so you don't even need to fake a drive using loop devices.
https://fitzcarraldoblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/17/creating-a...
Totally worked. Android called it an SD card in its UI but I was able to read/write files to it.
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.
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.
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.
I would not recommend this setup, Any real drive would be better. I just hated wasting drive bays for the non-critical boot/system partition. In my defense despite burning through many cheap usb drives I have not lost the boot yet, however I do keep a new spare drive taped to the unit.
It lasted a couple evenings while I bumped into apparently every Linux USB driver/chipset issue possible trying to drive a couple hundred drives via cheapo AliExpress USB hubs.
It was fun times, but even more useless than I originally thought it would be. It was amusing to get >1GBps for a minute or two across 256 crappy thumb drives though!
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.