USB Floppy Disk Drive RAID Array Under OS X

ohlssonvox writes "I believe this is the first USB Floppy Disk Drive RAID; I have never heard of any others. It was done using OS X. I would like to share this with the world. The world must know the power of USB FDD RAID!!! This is NOT an April fools joke, I just happen to be fool enough to make this on April fools."

Comments

Almost as good as PDA Beowulf

[mnmn]

Maybe this guy will build a wire structure that connects 10 floppies and handle. Then hold the structure and insert all floppies into properly aligned drives... Keep adding floppies to hopefully beat the speed of the IDE, then sell it.

Re:dock

[Farley Mullet]

is that a windows media player icon in the dock?...hmmmm

could be, they make windows media player for mac you know. . .

Re:dock

[Alex Thorpe]

Why yes, it is. The program sucks, doesn't support many of the codices that the other versions do, and uses more CPU power than the competition, but it's available.

Man,

[jerrytcow]

this guy's an idiot. Everyone knows that you should use RAID 5 (or 0+1) with something as unreliable as floppies.

Funny.

[Futurepower(R)]

Floppy disk RAID. Funnier than any April Fools day joke.

I'm speechless

[thedbp]

I think everyone's missing the real irony in that the iMac was the computer that dealt the first death blow to the floppy to begin with. Its taken Dell until this year to catch up w/ the down-with-floppies trend.

But now it seems that Mr. Jobs and Mr. Dell were both wrong, as this user has proven that with a little imagination, even useless technology can be made into something ... okay, well, I can't stretch this. its still useless. But its cool. Gives me hope that people like this aren't milling about the street causing trouble.

Re:I'm speechless

[juniormaj]

"entire nations have crusted and flaked in the hair around my navel." -Bill Hicks

If only Bill were alive to comment on everything going on today....

I know it has nothing to do with the floppy raid, which I plan on trying, by the way.

Re:no more usb ports!?

[isorox]

Ummm. .... usb hubs [compusa.com] is what he needs?

Ummm .... from the article: For USB FDD RAID II, I would like to ... get more hubs and go for the ultimate USB FDD RAID with 125 USB FDDs ( I need the other 2 vailable USB channels for mouse and keyboard)

This is more like it.

[Kris_J]

I'd love to see one of these using the 2.88MB format, but does anyone actually do a USB floppy drive that supports it?

Meanwhile, I wish April fools was more about stuff like this than just making up stuff.

Re:This is more like it.

[justzisguy]

Well not on my Mac, but I've seen this setting in the BIOS of my PC (running Linux, what else?). Where are these floppy disks and why didn't they ever become popular? The setting was even available on my 486, when WordPerfect took like 30 disks (and one was always bad...).

Re:This is more like it.

[Yarn]

Qps-Que used to make an LS120-type drive which could write 30-odd meg on a standard floppy. I've been trying to find one for ages :/

Re:This is more like it.

[martingunnarsson]

No, the LS-drives can write 120 MB to a special, more expensive floppy but can also read and write regular floppys. My friend has an LS-120 drive in his Amiga. They are connected throught IDE, that's pretty cool.

Re:This is more like it.

[Kris_J]

The 2.88 format stalled mostly because of media price and slow pickup. Factories had been too well setup for the 1.44 drives and disks so that the new 2.88 was seen as too expensive (disks more than drives) by many people. Perhaps once the floppy broke the 1MB barrier, people didn't really think they needed much more, or they needed a lot more. Software started being distributed on CD and anyone with major removable storage needs turned to Syquest and Iomega. (Gee, and didn't that turn out well?)

So, once the installed base of the drives failed to live up to expectations and major players moved to other formats, no one took the time to make the 2.88 more cost effective. Similar to the reason 8cm CDs mostly died (apart from in very specific markets).

It's a shame because the failure of the 2.88MB format stalled the whole floppy scene. In roughly the same time frame that CPUs became 500 times faster, standard floppy drives only doubled in capacity.

Re:This is more like it.

[Kris_J]

It looks like the "LS-240" is the drive you're looking for. Most reviews are a couple of years old, but they do exclaim that it can fit 32MB on a normal old 1.44MB floppy. Thing is, you get one write, then if you want to change anything you have to re-write the whole disk, so it wouldn't work for RAID. Still, 32MB is a neat trick, especially if it's a raw size without compression.

Mind you, if I said to one of my friends that I'd bought a superdrive, he'd never speak to me again. Flakey isn't the right word. Evil is getting closer. (At the same time, a sister organisation to where I work has a lab full of the things and no real complaints.)

Re:This is more like it.

[Yarn]

yes that's the one. I have a LS120 in my desktop, it works fine, but doesn't seem to be able to cram more onto standard floppies.

Re:This is more like it.

[ForestGrump]

2.88 is DEAD; Yea, i once had a 2.88 flopppy drive, used to carry around a 2.88 floppy but never used it (nobody else had a 2.88 drive.) My only reason for having a drive was because routers at work used 2.88 floppies to boot (1.44 was too small to vit all the data ont0) now, the drive and floppies were gone. dumped them with my p-100 box.

Not an April Fools Joke...

[mattwolfewvu]

Must explain why it's still not on the front page (for me at least, logged in or not, at this computer or another.)

CDR-RAID???

[use_compress]

Perhaps a pseudo practical application would be doing the same thing except with CDRs. Considering the low price of media and burners and the unreliability of the media, doing a raid-5 with five separate CDR would allow for extremely fast, reliable and cheep storage.

Whole new meaning to the I in RAID

[rajpaul]

RAID (original meaning):
Redundant
Array of
Inexpensive
Disks

This brings a whole new level to the "I" in RAID.

Re:Whole new meaning to the I in RAID

[billstewart]

Floppies aren't Inexpensive any more. They cost about a dime for the floppy, while El Cheapo blank CD-Rs also cost about a dime, and they're 400 times as large. I think I've gotten CD-RWs for about $0.50 on sale. And IDE drives cost about $1/GB as well.

On the other hand, it's certainly Redundant :-)

What about 127 USB devices

[scythian]

Doesn't OS X support around 127 USB devices or so? He should snag over a hundred of the floppy drives, connect them all together using tons of hubs, stick in all the disks, and then see how it performs. A pretty zippy, and bulky, compact flash card!
Brings a new face to portable usb media.
-Rob

Re:What about 127 USB devices

[martingunnarsson]

If you took a look at the article you'd have seen that he wants to do exactly this in the next "version".

Re:What about 127 USB devices

[pressman]

Apparently no one out at Intel has yet to get 127 devices actually connected all at the same time. 4 years ago after Apple's WWDC, apparently a bunch of drunk Apple engineers went back to the Apple campus and managed to get 127 devices connected to an iMac!

Drunk Apple engineers managing to pull off what the brainiacs over at Intel (who own the USB technology) can't... even when sober!

But who knows, this could all be stupid urban myth.

Re:What about 127 USB devices

[bryan1945]

Well, I know they at least tried, I remember seeing pictures of all those devices plugged in. Now whether or not it actually worked, I dunno.

Re:What about 127 USB devices

[Anonymous Freak]

I used to work in Intel's server group, and we did a whole bunch of wacky things (like setting up an 8-processor Xeon with 4GB of RAM just to run Quake 3 when it first came out.) One of them was to overload the USB bus. Using every USB peripheral we could get our grubby little hands on, in Windows 98, we got just over 100 devices plugged in, seeming to all work. (I recall having seven mice, and nine keyboards, along with a couple printers, a few scanners, about a dozen webcams...) Our main problem was finding USB peripherals! We had to raid other people's cubes after normal working hours and borrow their stuff (mostly the keyboards and mice) to finally reach the 100 mark.

I do remember talking to our testing guys, who did say that they did get 127 devices running, but it was a bitch. They blamed it on Windows 98. (I left Intel before Win2k, WinMe, or WinXP came out.)

As for everyday usage, the most I've ever had on one computer is my current desktop, which has 13 USB devices plugged in at all times, with another 3 occasional.

I'll be first in line...

[coolMikeUSC]

as long as I get 33MB/s read times...oh, wait...

Re:April Fools?

[rogueroo]

Always wear under wear
Always wear underwear

HIBT?

I thought up something like this...

[Oculus Habent]

I wanted to make a huge RAID of USB flash memory "Keys". If it weren't for the worthless speed you get out of USB 1.1, it could be quite cool.

Also, if you had a large number of USB Keys in stacks of long USB Hubs, it would be alot like iso-linear chips on Trek. :)

Now, on a more practical, barely serious note, what about a device with a FireWire 800 interface, that uses standard or DDR SDRAM, holds a battery backup, and writes it's data to a physical drive (preferably external) when power failure occurs...

Re:I thought up something like this...

[henele]

I wanted to make a huge RAID of USB flash memory "Keys". If it weren't for the worthless speed you get out of USB 1.1, it could be quite cool.

You could use Wiebetech's firewire flash/microdrive keychain, maybe even on multiple firewire buses, but for size/performance ratios disk-only ipod-like units are usually going to win.. Daisy chaining them all around your monitor or something though would look cute :)

I think you mean Floptical.

[Myself]

Unrelated to, and years earlier than, LS120. The floptical uses a floppy-like head mechanism, except it packs the tracks much closer together. It does this by using an optical pickup to align the head, rather than the dumb stepping used by regular floppy designs.

I've thought about this actually...

[Myself]

Remember those ads when the Zip came out, that featured a stack of seventysome floppies, towering and teetering? "You can store ALL THIS on one Zip disk!", they screamed.

Just recently I was looking at 120GB hard drives and thinking, shit, that would be one huge pile of floppies. Nevermind how long it would take to read them all!

Then I said, wait, what if each one were in a drive? Figure you can read/write an entire floppy in about a minute or two. The maximum sustained transfer rate on a hard drive isn't that great. Given a hundred thousand floppy drives and controllers for them all, you could beat the fastest hard drives with ease. Just imagine the noise and heat generation, though.

Let's hear it for stupid applications of obsolete technology! (next week's installment: dot matrix printers feeding sheetfed scanners as a backup medium / high-latency network interface.)

Re:That's ridiculous

[caligulla]

Did you ever consider that OS X is just as capable of making a RAID array of 250M Zip drives? He just used floppies as an exercise in the absurd.

Hell, OSX can made a RAID array out of partitions on the same physical volume, not that it gets you anything but maybe mirroring to make sure you don't run into a bad byte that loses you a whole file.... Not that this is likely considering the reliability of the drivers.

Re:That's ridiculous

[rworne]

It just may RAID Zip drives, but we also must remember the piss-poor throughput of USB for mass storage devices.

He mentioned trying to max out the number of devices and ran out of ports, but how many floppy drives are really needed to saturate USB in a RAID configuration? I would guess a hell of a lot less than 127 of them. Aren't floppy drives something like 150K/sec? So wouldn't 8 or so of them completely saturate the USB bandwidth?

I got to admit, the article is funny as hell.

Re:dock

[Knobby]

Yeah, WiMP for the Mac sucks!. MPlayer for OSX is much nicer.