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iPod Shuffle RAID
ricercar writes "So, what do you do when you and some friends are all getting iPod Shuffles? You make a RAID array out of them, of course! The original intent was to actually install OS X on the RAID and boot from that, but the OS X (Panther, 10.3.5) Installer wouldn't allow it."
maybe a linux distro can make it possible?
The next step is to install linux on it.
Of course I have no idea what one can do with a linux iPod shuffle.
What would the boot times be like?
Wait, anyone know of any flash hard drives for PCs/Macs that work via SATA? This would be interesting to do, almost instant boot.
I don't think I could afford that without going to the ATM Machine and using my PIN Number to withdraw more money!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
hosting the server on them too.
Pisser.
So? You can make a raid array out of anything
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
"So, what do you do when you and some friends are all getting iPod Shuffles? Why run a web server on them, of course!
Yeah, but can it run a beowulf cluster of linux korean old people in soviet russia---
Oh, forget it.
...if someone did it with floppy drives OF COURSE they would try it with iPods. How could steve be proved wrong about the inferiority of the floppy drive as a mass storage device?. </a>
<br><br>
<a href="http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm">Link
Beep beep.
This and other hacks can be found at hackaday.com
"If it has screws, it was meant to be taken apart."
I really don't want to be a troll, but this seems rather inane to me. They made a RAID array from a bunch of thumb drives - so what? If they had installed OSX on it, then maybe, but for now, can't we limit slashdot to innovative and never-before-seen things?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Wait, anyone know of any flash hard drives for PCs/Macs that work via SATA? This would be interesting to do, almost instant boot.
I remember doing random file access on a DEC TU16 (9 track reel to reel tape drive) That was a trip. Slow, but cool to watch.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
not to mention pedantic, but...
really, a RAID array?
isn't that like an ATM machine?
a PIN number?
BMG music group?
RAS syndrome? (Redundant Acronym Syndrome)
Where's Robin Hood? We could kinda really use him now.
That is unfair. The Apple Store is sold out of them for weeks, and I can't buy one for my wife for Valentine's Day, and these guys have so many they are making a RAID with them.
:-)
Where is the justice?
Coralized link
And the best part is that every file request is randomized! You'll rediscover the data you already own and haven't worked with in years!
It's dead Jim.
Is that site in your bookmarks? Do you jerk off to it a lot? Have you thought about purchasing one? I could loan you the money you know, all you have to do is ask.
Love,
Mom
That is great! Who needs to DoS sites when we have slashdot :) I think this is the reason i only read headlines, and try to read the full story a day later..
-----
Im not impatient, I just hate waiting.
Worst. Web server. Ever.
if one shuffle goes "corrupt" and music from one shuffle gets "recreated" on another? ;)
doing this with 2 normal usb key drives, a raid array with the striped data on them, you could save all kinds of secret stuff on them which would be useless unless you had both drives!
It could replace those security systems where 2 people have a key and there are 2 locks which must be opened at the same time for it to work.. just have 2 usb keys stripped, with a pgp key on them, which must be then inserted in to the security system at the same time for it to work or something
i dunno, im just spouting things!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Site's been slashdotted...or the damn battery died again!
Currently bidding on sig
I guess the web server was using this RAID...dead already.
How many writes is the flash in iPod shuffle certified for?
Interesting hack, but running a DB-driven website off 'em is not the wisest idea..
OTOH, I've worked at jobs with stupider infrastructures...
Create a clean install on a regular hard-drive using the Panther installer and then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive.
Sorry... but it's not entirely off the mark this time!
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Thanks to the RIAA, I want to avoid anything having to do with digital music players and "raids".
That's hardly the right attitude from a supposed hacker.
When Solaris 10 wouldn't allow installation on my Ultra1, I hex-edited the ISO, reburned, and installed anyways (and that only took me one evening).
It's SOFTware for crying out loud! Show some initiative!
You don't deserve karma, you clod.
For those a little slower than the rest...
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks Array RAID
Please don't mod this redundant.
00 48 00 00 FF ED 10 F2 70 20 33 2E 30 00 88 ...
But this guy ate his iPod shuffle.
sulli
RTFJ.
Now that we can do a RAID Array, I want to see someone turn it into a beowulf cluster. Imagine the sound processing power we could harness by chaining 400 iPods together! Music listening would never be the same again!
:) Either that or a really expensive geek tracking system
:)
Ooh, ooh! I know! Setup an Uber iPod (uPod) add in wireless (wiPod? because!). If we got normal iPods with built-in wireless in the future, we could have one hell of a distributed computing network
Useless tech implementations rock
Is that site in your bookmarks? Do you jerk off to it a lot? Have you thought about purchasing one? I could loan you the money you know, all you have to do is ask.
Love,
Mom
Please?
They just need to follow this hint
I don't think Macs can boot off of USB 2.0. That would be one reason.
I understand Apple went with USB 2.0 to cater to the PC crowd, but making the drive firewire would have been revolutionary.
The Kangaru Fire flash drives KILL USB 2.0 in transfer speeds and CAN boot a Mac OR a PC.
A raid would have been possible otherwise.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
http://mirrordot.org/stories/b810b5b7bf18eb8d82adf 1137dae0587/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/b810b5b7bf18eb8d82adf 1137dae0587/index.html
Btw, Why not automatically create a mirror on mirrordot and link it here? Why do we need a nerd to search for the mirrordot link if we have enough nerds to fix a small problem like this?
Repeat of down, half the distance to the goal.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Brain: Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
Pinky: Yeah, Brain, but if we could get that many iPod Shuffles and set them up as a RAID device would we still be able to listen to music on them?
Brain: stares blankly at Pinky
Looks like those corners are too sharp! They should have taken some design cues from Sanrio.
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/b810b5b7bf18eb8d8 2adf1137dae0587/index.html
Here I thought they were just really popular...
Only Firewire booting works, so this is a futile effort anyway.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
But I've got Mod Points, too, and I'm going to mod them up!
Muuuuhahaha!
Brain: Pinky, have you been reading Slashdot again?
Naw, I was just joshing. What the RIAA would do is take the grandparent of one of the shuffle owners to court, as a way of keeping the rest of the local systems in line.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
-1, RAIDundant
It's sort of hard to do that from a SOFTware-managed RAID set. Had it been hardware RAID, no problem.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Someone did this years ago with 3.25" floppy disks. There's nothing particularly new or interesting here. You can create a raid out of just about anything! :) Well, I suppose it would be particularly cool if someone made an array out of punch cards.
You could make anything that can be mounted part of a software raid. I don't see the great innovation here!
Assuming you have some Xsan licenses lying around (you bought Xsan or are part of the seed program), you can install Xsan http://apple.com/xsan on your shuffle. You need to initialize the shuffle as being one big free space partition using disk utility, then use Xsan Admin to label the shuffle as a LUN.
;-)
Instant iPod Shufle SAN. Of course, only one machine can access it... and it is really slow. Throw in a powered USB hub and some more shuffles and you may be able to get a few meg a second.
Take that floppy disk RAID!
Word to the wise: running your iPod drive that hot, that frequently causes your battery to lose its longevity pretty severely. I regret having done it last year.
I hate Grammar Nazi's
The Shuffles kept returning the boot blocks in a random order!
Think, soon you might load multiple OS on the RAID and have it shuffle which one boots?
Damn it! Windows95 again!
Save some for the "they must be hosting their site on it" posts while you're at it.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Circuit_City_to_Ca rry_iPod_Shuffle/1107889065Link to a BetaNews story about it...
:\
No, I've never linked before.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't...what about the other 8?
Oh, and you can't boot OS X from a USB RAID. I'm pretty sure you can boot from an IDE RAID (I mean an OS X software RAID, not a hardware RAID where the computer never sees the individual drives), and maybe even from a Firewire RAID, but USB is right out.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ltd05VVtS10J: www.wrightthisway.com/Articles/000154.html+ipod+sh uffle+raid/
Did we quit after the Germans Bombed Pearl harbor?
Hell no...
My sigs offend the max # of people all over the world, regardless of race, religion, color, sex or creed. It's a gift.
All your jokes are belong to us...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
I think not, because it's down now. It might have helped, too.
And lo, for the Darkness which feeds on Slashdot arose in wrath, and spake thus: "Mention an ancient near-dead Slashdot 'joke', do you, boy? Feel the force of the Slashdot as it falls upon thee!"
... in Japan! And all, as one, welcomed their new Slashdot overlords - except in Nebraska, where a million Slashdot editors cried out in torment, and were silenced.
And then the Darkness descended, and a storm of nerds fell upon the thread, and tore it hither and thither with their teeth and keyboards and mice, and the jokes made were of a putridness hitherto unknown even in the dark ASCII-porn and GNAA-filled underbelly of Slashdot.
Yea, and verily was there a gnashing of teeth and a banging of heads as Natalie Portman, petrified and covered in hot grits, reminded YOU that all your old Korean ladies were now belong to us
And lo, for in this time of despair a glimmer of hope appeared, as finally was revealed the Secret Concealed from all since time immemorial, the unknown last-but-one step in the great Slashdot Business Plan. The answer was found to be simp...
ATH+++
NO CARRIER
Another slashdot article about how OSX can make a software RAID out of USB devices...
You could create a striped RAID array, copy your sensitive encrypted information to it, and you each go on your way with one of the units.
Not until you reassemble and say, "Wonder Twin Powers, Activate!" will the data be accessible again (a la Ford Fairlane).
Could happen.
This is so fucking lame. No, really.
I'm not kidding, stop posting this stuff.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
A Beowulf cluster of these things would be awesome.
This RAID array is just meh.
That is sooooooo nerdy.
Huh? You can't boot off of software RAID on OS X?
You must be able too.
I used to use a software RAID on my primary boot disk in Windows NT years ago. As long as the boot loader is aware it's not a problem.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I'm seriously not trying to troll or anything, but I remember when I used to hear Kevin Rose (of the Screensavers) talk about stuff he read on Slashdot. Now I read stuff on Slashdot that Kevin Rose talked about last week. No longer is it "news for nerds" it is more like "news nerds have already heard". Sad, truly sad.
On a happy note, congrats to Kevin Rose for doing a better job of sharing the news with me.
Which is 25 years longer than the battery will last. Not that the market seems to care that a few years from now iPods will be nothing more land fill.
After paying $300 for my 20G iPod, and convincing my friends to do the same, I'll stripe the music data over the iPods. I can have the fastest music player in the world! At the end of the day when we each go on our separate ways, we'll each be left with...
/.ed...
-The germans?
-Leave it...He's on a roll
More importantly, you can't boot off of USB.
No, because we never bombed Pearl Harbor.
In Soviet Russia, Linux compiles you!
Uhhh
now this is just dumb
a 20 gig ipod=hp would cost lst and hold 5x the data..
you need a hobby like maybe writing spyware or viri
Many machines these days accept a USB (or alternative-media drive) to be an acceptable boot device to start from. In fact, this handy little NC6000 from HP can boot from USB, or even from the SD card reader it has embedded. All it does is lump it in with 'removable media' and goes from there.
It is a quote from National Lampoon's Animal House. John Belushi played Bluto, a drunk and stupid frat guy. The frat house was being shutdown by the dean and Bluto was trying to mobilize his frat brothers with this quote. The point was he was ranting and did not even know what he was talking about. It does not translate well and was not meant to offend anyone. Underlying meaning was the original poster was ranting, but didn't quite know what he was talking about. MY apologies.
My sigs offend the max # of people all over the world, regardless of race, religion, color, sex or creed. It's a gift.
RAID 0 on a Mac with Flash drives
USB is bootable. IIRC, the only problem is that there is no standard defining how a BIOS can determin the USB drive's "geometry", being cylinders, heads and sectors.
My Compaq laptop has a PDF available that explains how to boot it from a USB key. That is where I got the info above.
1. install MacOS X on an empty harddrive
2. launch Carbon Copy Cloner
3. clone the OS from the HDD to the Shuffle RAID
(don't forget to mark 'make bootable' in CCC's options
that should work.
As a rabid Apple whore, I still have to wonder what the hell they were thinking when they developed this things: (Jobs) How can we make our iPods cheaper? (Engrs) Well, we've already taken out everything but the screen. (Jobs) Then take it out too! (Engrs) But how will they select their songs? (Jobs) Who cares? We'll have PR come up with a snappy name and tell everyone it's COOL. Those Cupertino boys, I swear.
Hey, that's a pretty nifty throwing star that the guy created. I like how Apple is so good at industrial design that they manage to make even unintentional uses for their product look awesome.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Well that's flat out wrong. Macs have always been able to boot from USB for as long as they've had the ports. Same goes for Firewire and (long ago) SCSI. Macs have had a history of being able to boot off of just about any storage device you could hook up. Things like USB, Firewire, SCSI, CD-ROM, and Ethernet drivers are all in the firmware to allow boot support.
As for booting off of software RAID, could someone explain how this is possible? Hardware RAID makes sense - the adapter (whether onboard or on a PCI card) abstracts all of that away from the BIOS, which only sees a single disk by default. However, your BIOS isn't going to know jack-squat about the RAID volumes that an OS set up. I'm really asking - how would a software RAID be capable of booting?
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
or RAID of iPod shuttle Beowulfs
Q. What do you hear when you format the iPod array? A. All your favorite songwriters decomposing.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
This reminds me of an old Styx tune ... sing it with me now ....
"Too much time on my hands ...."
Why not use Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich software instead of the official OS X installer? I'm surprised no one's suggested this (from what i've seen).
You could possibly boot into the Open Firmware console and use a lot of voodoo to setup software RAID. And you can connect to the console remotely and possible load the software from another already-running machine.
English is easier said than done.
Technically speaking older Macs can be booted from a USB thumb drive if you are using OS 9. I used to use a 128MB thumb drive with OS 9 for troubleshooting.
But now that all the Macs running OS 9 have been phased out I don't need that anymore. Now I can boot the machines using a remote disk image stored on an XServe. I love OS X!
You make a RAID array out of them...
:)
Why would you want a whole array of RAID's? Isn't one enough?
This reminds me of those ECM countermeasure things.
It seems pretty bad when you need a countermeasure for the countermeasures...
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
>And I'm going to mod down every 'How about a >Beowulf cluster of these' post without mercy. Yeah? Well you can't if I reply to this post :p
According to a friend who's an Apple engineer, some of the engineers call them iTampons.
Linear flash went out of style years ago, as any Newton owner can tell you.
Out of style my furry foot. "Linear flash" is byte- or word-addressed flash memory, often called "NOR flash". It's alive and well in the GBA homebrew development community. In fact, I typed this comment with one hand while holding my Visoly Flash Advance card in the other.
There is a tendency among English speakers to use acronyms and other initialisms as adjectives because so many of those abbreviations are trademarks, and trademarks are supposed to be used as adjectives followed by a generic term.
In addition, without a generic term, overloaded abbreviations can cause confusion. "ATM" is both automated teller machine and asynchronous transfer mode. "Go to the store and get a RAID" could refer to a storage array or a can of insecticide. "Enter your PIN" could mean key in a password or push a straight object into a malfunctioning floppy or CD drive to eject the media.
what if you have it loaded with George Harrison's "All Things Shall Pass"?
For one thing, the album was called All Things Must Pass. For another, the infamous single from that album ("My Sweet Lord") is evidence of everything that's wrong with the music publishing industry. It is combinatorically next to impossible to create an original song nowadays.
(Why am I on your foes list?)
I wonder if it would work with something like Carbon Copy Cloner and PSU Blast Image Config to take an image of an OS X install and copy it to the Shuffle RAID?
I would try it if I had 4 iPod Shuffles!
Sound waves should be free!
That is why you can't just install Windows or Linux on a Flash card, and have it work more than a couple of days. The virtual memory gets written over and over again.
Then put 512 MB of RAM in your machine and turn off the swap file. If you're on stock GNU/Linux, you can throw in JFFS2 or another wear-leveling file system for good measure.
Ahh. You CAN boot off a software RAID in OS X, but it has to be on a supported bus. The USB and FireWire busses do not have RAID drivers in firmware, IIRC. Anyone who wants to do RAID on firewire or USB is foolish anyway, the bottleneck is the bus and the 'glue' chip, not the disk.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Anybody pointed that out yet?
Don't have a link, but I checked this on Apple's support site when I got my clamshell iBook, before they put firewire on those. I got the iBook anyway, and have not reqretted it, even though I've wasted probably forty+ hours making sure Apple's support pages weren't just fuzzing over something simple.
I think it _might_ be possible to boot from a USB drive if you get into openboot and add some really arcane stuff to select netbooting and have it check the USB for the netboot, and then somehow program a USB device to spit the netboot image down the USB pipe.
I don't think I'm describing that very well. Not sure I want to try any harder, though.
I think I'd just take the easy way and and hang some firewire drives on the mini.
Guess that's why I'm not a real geek.
That's wrong - there is such a standard, EDD - Enhanced Disk Drive services. It can indicate to the operating system that your harddrive is attached to ide, scsi, fibrechannel, firewire, or usb, which pci adapter hosts the drive, its location on the host adapter's bus, and the full geometry of the device. Pretty much every PC bios dating from the P3 era supports at least version 2.2, and many of the P4 machines I've seen support version 3.0.
fnord.
Yet another case of "If I have to explain it, it's not funny." :-|
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
http://www.kinetta.com/home.php/
You had a cell? Back in my day all matter and energy in the universe was compressed into a point smaller than those tiny transistors you punk kids use as a sorry excuse for a switch!
This very much reminds of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, and T Zero both of which star qwfwq in adventures involving time before time, space before space, and other fanciful stories regarding physics and the nature of the universe. Sort of like Flatland but even better. Here's a site that talks about parallels between Calvino and Borges.
blog
So do a dual channel raid. Just make sure you have two FW buses. FW cards are cheap.
Also note that people use RAID for different reasons. Some want to mirror for data redundancy, others want to stripe for speed, still others want both. And a few, mistakenly, want to kill bugs dead.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I've used software raid for a root partition under linux before, the software raid is partition based so i create 2 partitions for raid, and an additional smaller "boot" partition, the kernel is loaded from the boot partition, detects the arrays and continues booting... I assume other os's could work in much the same way.. The data for how the raid is setup is stored in a particular block at the start of each partition, so you can even move the disks into different orders and they will continue working, you dont need to have already booted the os and load a configuration file..
It's possible that the firmware of a system could load this same information, or store it in an eeprom setting (better to load from a disk block, incase the motherboard fries and you have to move the disks to another box) and i believe hardware raid arrays work in this same way too.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
I don't know the technical details under Windows, but when I ran soft RAID on my Windows NT 4 system, the RAID was configured after the OS install. You setup the system, then enabled the RAID. So what I would imagine happened is that the boot still occured off of the primary drive, the bootloader had the support for the software RAID, brought the RAID up first and then started booting Windows off of it.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Not necesarrily, because the replier was German and he may not have seen the movie. The OP was replying to ensure he was not mistaken as trying to be factual.
Maybe- If I have to explain why, involving someone who probably wouldn't get the joke, a joke isn't funny, maybe I'm just being a wee bit dumb?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
This is one of those things that is kind of pointless...but ultimately...very damn cool. I like it.
I must be wakewalking through dreams.