Software RAID Arrays

[skip0110]

Somebody made a 4 gig software RAID array out of 4 iPod Shuffles. Right here.

In the same vein, another person made a floppy disk RAID array. Right here.

I found them to be pretty cool.

 

[LoudMusic]

And completely useless.

 

[skip0110]

C'mon! 3.9 MB storage in floppy disks (and about, say, $50 in hardware) is so much cooler than spending that $50 on a 256 MB memory stick.

 

[Stinky Chicken]

Whoa! That's so... crappy.

Why would anyone waste their time on that?

 

[LoudMusic]

Whoa! That's so... crappy.

Why would anyone waste their time on that?

It's a very geeky thing to do. I would do it too if I had the hardware. But I wouldn't do a writeup on a website about it like they did. After all what have they done? Purchased hardware and used software. It is designed so that anyone can do what they have done. Congratulations ...

However, if they had done something like WRITE the software to make it possible, that would be different. Or made it so you could do RAID on floppies across a network. But it's still useless.

I've been wanting to build a multi-terabyte RAID for a long time - but that's in a completely different league.

 

[VIPFREAK]

And completely useless.

Exactly...

 

[Flerbizky]

I've been wanting to build a multi-terabyte RAID for a long time - but that's in a completely different league.

On floppies ?......

 

[emad]

awwwww yeeea man. But not with the chintzy 3.5 inch floppies. It's gotta be multi-terabytes with those 5.25 inchers.

 

[Flerbizky]

awwwww yeeea man. But not with the chintzy 3.5 inch floppies. It's gotta be multi-terabytes with those 5.25 inchers.

8 inch floppies RULE !......

 

[LoudMusic]

Didn't they make 12" floppies at one time? Or am I dreaming that?

I want to build a TB RAID 5 Array on audio cassette tapes.

BAM!

 

[Flerbizky]

Didn't they make 12" floppies at one time? Or am I dreaming that?

AFAIK - You dreamt that...

I want to build a TB RAID 5 Array on audio cassette tapes.

BAM!

Betamax 0wn5 your audio cassettes f00 ....!

 

[LoudMusic]

8-Track ... f00.

A RAID array of LPs!

 

[CDailey]

Didn't they make 12" floppies at one time? Or am I dreaming that?

I want to build a TB RAID 5 Array on audio cassette tapes.

BAM!

Speaking of a TB RAID 5 arrary, my brother has one set up in his rig. 👍

Wish I had it.

 

[toyomatt84]

It's a fun idea for a boring weekend. I give these people props.

 

[RX-7_FC_DrIfteR]

Haha, i would just stick with Zip Disk...

 

[emad]

pfft... how about a multi-terabyte raid array of FPM-RAM drives!!!

Actually, that would be pretty slick - making a few volatile hard drives

 

[LoudMusic]

pfft... how about a multi-terabyte raid array of FPM-RAM drives!!!

Actually, that would be pretty slick - making a few volatile hard drives

If I had the cash I would buy a 10GB RAM disk. Windows wouldn't know what to do with itself from booting so fast.

 

[VT]

Windows would probably crash because it booted so fast. Sorta like getting the bends (decompression sickness) from returning to the surface to quickly after scuba diving.

 

[emad]

If I had the cash I would buy a 10GB RAM disk. Windows wouldn't know what to do with itself from booting so fast.

erm... I suggested FPM Ram from more than 10 years ago, not the good DDR and DDR 2 stuff

Still, i've seen people set up ram drives for windows. It works pretty sweet from what I'm told. It's just that the CPU has to be able to keep up

 

[LoudMusic]

Yeah. The biggest bottleneck these days is the fixed disk. Everything else is blazing fast. I've looked into spending thousands of dollars on multi-drive stripe setups to increase my disk access speeds and haven't found anything that makes me happy. Seems like four or so years ago I was interested in a 66mhz 63bit PCI quad channel SCSI RAID controller from Adaptec and eight of the fastest SCSI drives on the market. It was going to be about $2,600 but a stripe of all those drives would have been screaming fast. Something in the range of 240MB/s as opposed to the average single disk speed today of 35MB/s. But everything's gotten cheaper so maybe it's time to look again.

 

[LoudMusic]

Yes my friends, the end of crappy disk speeds is upon us.

http://www.3ware.com/products/benchmarks_sata.asp

409.4MB/s with eight drives striped. And an impressive 402.8MB/s with eight drives in RAID 5. I think I'd probably go with striping though to get better write performance in a workstation. RAID 5 for servers, no doubt.

 

[emad]

Can you please explain why you want to spend $2000+ on a hard drive setup?

I still say the ram drives are the way to go 👍

 

[LoudMusic]

As far as I know, RAM drives are still rediculously expensive for very little space. I just calculated that you can get over half a terabyte of storage that moves at over 400MB/s for under $2,000. BA-DASS.

In a server situation it would rock balls. In a workstation situation you could open large video files extremely fast.

Here's a good example. Say you had a network with ... 100+ workstations. Instead of buying the fastest single disk for each workstation why not just net-boot them from a server with hella fast disk? Put gigabit in each of them and four gigabit connections in the server and everything is faster. Their disk access would be limited by network speed, which would be 120MB/s, as opposed to disk speed which is 35MB/s.

Basically just for fun. To say you did.