I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives (opens in new tab)

I'm used to referring to lots of IO as "noisy" or "chatty", but then I imagine sitting next to 30 floppy drives and that brings it to another level.

Ooh I’d love to see/hear a video of that if you’re willing! :)

If we take any portable media as the comparison, the largest I know of is 50GB for a blueray disk, that’s still something you can ‘almost’ load into 32gb of memory (if your OS and Teams app didn’t take 16gb of course).

Is this true? This feels hard to imagine that computers would load the entire diskette into memory. Apparently the Atari ST had up to 4MB of RAM.

I can imagine many programs doing this though.

You can even use mdadm to add a ramdisk as a single disk RAID array with write-through to a physical disk.

Every time you reboot, it will repair the array.

No. The cache is at the block layer, not the file/directory layer. So the filesystem will look up the directory structure, which will be cached.

I (briefly) ran an IRC server on a Sega Dreamcast based on the same ideas

A Knoppix 4 CTF doesn't sound too challenging, tbf mate

edit: thinking about it, there's some good educational value, but maybe via vm than plopped on the interwebs :D

I managed to grab a (hopefully) uncorrupted version somehow. I'm putting it somewhere other than imgur so they don't recompress the image. MD5 d30fcc384a8e2de4fab3056bde42b00b. [EDIT: Removed dead link, use archive.org instead]

> I'd be curious to know what failure mode(s) conjured the 0xf6's into existence.

Today's fun fact: The MS-DOS `format` command fills the disk with 0xf6, not 0x00. Though this is linux running on Mac hardware, reading a disk that should have actual data, so maybe that isn't the reason.

hmm... is it possible to correct those errors? I have some old images with errors, and I've always wondered if it were possible to fix the individual corrupted bytes to restore at least the remainder of the photos.

heh, that's even worse than when I saw it:

https://i.imgur.com/Z2HwkwY.jpeg

A few years ago I finally bought a USB drive to read an old 3.5" floppy from the late '90s on which I had archived my e-mail messages before moving away to college. I completely forgot about write protection (as well as atime write-backs). I managed to read a surprising amount of data off of the disk, but I think less than if I had remembered to write-protect the disk before inserting it into the drive. The files were in mbox format, probably from Eudora, but possibly Pine. As is my habit, I first poked around with ls and less before copying the files over, and I'm pretty sure I ended up with more corruption than what I first saw with less.

Oh well. The irony is that to this day I have a tick of idly running `sync` at the command prompt, which I developed dealing with floppy and hard disk corruption running early versions of Linux. A crash or (IIRC) even a simple reboot sometimes resulted in disk corruption preventing Linux from booting. Reinstalling Slackware from floppy disks took quite awhile on its own, especially if installing the X11 disk sets, but half the time at least one of the disks would be corrupted, requiring me to download a fresh copy (using Windows--I was dual booting) over my 2400 baud modem, and then restarting the install from scratch. I probably went through this procedure at least a half dozen times, or at least enough to develop the tick. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.... =)

Oh that write protect could prevent wear and tear!

> RAID0 is for speed only

In this case, the theoretical maximum bandwidth is 24MBit/s.

The problem is the old, slow usb bottleneck. I'm not sure how much faster, probably hundreds of bps rather than under 24, but a faster RAID0 rig would be to instead have 30x Mac G4 Digital Audios connected via gigabit switch, and share then RAID0 the internal floppies. It would also have whatever advantage running an XGrid PPC cluster on Tiger might provide. These boxes also ran PPC Ubuntu; no doubt Linux would eek out a dozen or so more bps, plus beowulf.

But where will you put are the Warez?

Yup

I just do whatever I want

Yeah those two parts, and those forced laughs came out a bit sour to me too, but it was entertaining watch nonetheless.

I doubt most "home" level servers could unless they were serving up nothing but a short text file.

Oh, is that the one with like 10 1" fans spinning at 8,000 RPM, so that it sounds like a Harrier jet coming in for a landing?

Haha, the good old DL360. That fan noise was loud. Let alone the spinning, whining 15k SCSI disks..

Oh god, flashbacks to an early 2000s machine room absolutely full of the bastards.

Thankfully, all entrance doors had an earplug dispenser...

RAID0 adds both speed and capacity.

OP had posted a link to a stats page

Images do not fully load but here I am 35 minutes after you and the website still responds. That's already better than many.

It stayed alive as long it could start going black carbon, much longer than others I think.

And edge caching on cloudflare or cloudfront.