[HN Gopher] USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004)
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USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004)
Author : donnachangstein
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-04-15 22:41 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| rideontime wrote:
| He's not wrong, Riviera is pretty groovy.
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvjLW0i-2Ebq9iQoZ-m2R...
| jmclnx wrote:
| I remember reading something like this a very long time ago. It
| must have been about what this guy did. Real cool.
| rzzzt wrote:
| 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
| geerlingguy wrote:
| 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
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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
| somat wrote:
| 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > 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
| accrual wrote:
| > 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| U320 SCSI LTO-5 can be had cheap. Nobody wants them these days.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah but who knows if the data will be there in 10 years on
| the SSD? For tapes, it's about 20-30 years.
| somat wrote:
| 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.
| irusensei wrote:
| 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.
| mattl wrote:
| Is that the same video where they shout at a hard disk?
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