USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004) | Hacker News Reader

USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004)

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The 8-Bit Guy (formerly iBook Guy) created an array using USB sticks: https://youtu.be/dougISKs2vQ

Action Retro has a video with floppies: https://youtu.be/1hc52_PWeU8

He also references a MacWorld article with Daniel's array: https://www.macworld.com/article/165663/floppyraid.html

Was going to post the Action Retro attempt. Latency is abysmal, yet it's still a glorious thing to see it (kinda) work at all.

Need to see if someone can hack together RAID on cassettes on an old Apple II

This is, quite possibly, one of the best nerd sniping comments I’ve seen.

Two thoughts come to mind, one not serious, one serious.

1. I can’t imagine having to align the counters on all those tapes.

2. I’m guessing this would really only work for sequential reading and writing. In some ways that makes it more fun as the latency would be that much worse.

I have done it with usb floppy drives under openbsd, I am sure it is just as trivial under linux but I had obsd and a bunch of usb floppy drives at my disposal.

    #it has been a few years I don't remember if it works with bare drives or if you need a disklabel on each floppy
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    #the raid will show up now, check dmesg
    disklabel -E sd5
    newfs /dev/sd5a
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy/
    umount /mnt/floppy
    bioctl -d sd5
    #after inserting all floppies reassemble the raid
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy

I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

One day in what was probably sullen resentment that openbsd has no equivalent to DRBD I assembled a raid on iscsi drives, that is, initiate 5 iscsi sessions to independent hosts then assemble a raid with them. and you can imagine my surprise when it very nearly worked, I could read and write just fine. The part that did not work was drive failure. My guess is that iscsid did not fail a drive in a way that softraid understood. so a drive failure just lead to everything hanging.

> I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

Yeah:)

> Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

- Doug Gwyn

> I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

Agree! My first thought while reading the article was that it would be very easy to do this on OpenBSD as well, either with USB floppies or normal 34-pin drives as well.

OpenBSD's softraid stack doesn't care much about what the underlying hardware is as long as it looks like a disk and talks like a disk.

There is a YouTube video on the Action Retro channel, where this article is used as inspiration. Apparently you're not able to use any random floppy drive, but you can use more than five.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8

I thought about trying this with LTO drives, to have a ridiculously slow but also ridiculously high capacity raid, but sadly the LTO tape decks are a bit too expensive for this experiment.

U320 SCSI LTO-5 can be had cheap. Nobody wants them these days.

Yeah though that wouldn’t have a lot of storage, only 1.5 terabytes per tape. A new 2TB SSD is only about $100 and can easily be connected via usb.

Yeah but who knows if the data will be there in 10 years on the SSD? For tapes, it's about 20-30 years.

the tape may last 30 years. but do you really expect the tape drive to last that long, or, to even be able to get a tape drive that works in the future.

That was my big problem with the economics of tape. the drives are expensive and don't really last that long. At some scale factor tape makes sense, but it is larger than you would naively think.

As there is no good solution for personal scale long term archive type storage, I have sort of given up on it. Actual long term archives take the form of human readable printed documents. However this is very low density. so only the most important stuff. long term bulk storage is live, hard drives based arrays and backups, requiring an active maintainer it will die when I do, but no great loss, it is mostly junk anyhow.

I remember reading something like this a very long time ago. It must have been about what this guy did. Real cool.

He's not wrong, Riviera is pretty groovy. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvjLW0i-2Ebq9iQoZ-m2R...

Not floppies but I clearly remember some Sun Microsystems video demonstrating ZFS where some guys dressed as over the top engineers randomly disconnecting USB thumb drives that were part of a pool to show the file system resilience.

Is that the same video where they shout at a hard disk?

This feels like a storage solution that needs a "|0| days since last data loss" sign. Take the reliability of floppies under continuous read write cycles and divide it by 5?

The whole point is to avoid data loss, floppies are notoriously prone to failure, if you can do raid on floppy, you can survive loss of a disk.

Now if you are stripping... Well... then sure the data loss is your own fault, you have taken the R out of RAID.

Right but as the title and post say, we are discussing striping.

I love the "because I can" projects. There's another guy that made a whole music box from hundreds of floppies. Amazing. I love that kind of dedication.

One of my 'friends' is very capitalist and it makes him actually angry that people spend so much time on something that doesn't make money. I find it sad that he doesn't understand the concept of fun. And he has plenty of money.

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