Floppy RAID! An idea whose time has come.

[TheHorta]

I'm gonna be RICH! I can't believe no one's thought of this before.

Sure, your average, everyday 1.44MB floppy disk drive may be slow and low capacity, but RAID, say... 1,000 of those puppies together and what do you get? 1.44 GIGABYTE of high-performance floppy heaven! Now we're talkin'.

You wanna talk "hot swappable"! What's easier than popping a floppy that just developed bad sectors out and slipping a replacement in? Badda bing, badda boom! $.50 and ya' got yourself a brand new disk.

10,000 RPM? Forget about it! Yesterday's news. You might as well have Emeril use one of them to cook up some Cajun Shrimp on one'a them fryin' pans. BAM!

You wanna talk redundant? You stipe a bunch of 36GB scorchers together and one dies, you lose 36GB of data and your array goes PFFTT! A floppy dies, you lose 1.44MB of data and the array keeps on ticking, then you just pop a 50-cent disk right in there and badda bing, badda boom, you're back in the saddle!

Don't nobody's go stealin' my idea here either. And all you investor wannabes, don't waste my time.

We're goin' to the moon with this puppy.

LONG LIVE THE FLOPPY!

 

[AdamK47]

I hope you know your going to have to find a way to run those 1000 floppy disks in 1000 floppy drives at the same time in order to have them running RAID.

 

[Guilty]

How does 1000x1.44MB RAIDed produce 1.44Gigs? It's still just 1.44MB's... even stripped or mirrored....am I forgetting a RAID level that does this?

 

[MichaelD]

LOL! Funny. Imagine all 1000 drives doing that "click" thing all at once. It'd sound like driving a car over a long sheet of bubble wrap. "Click-ick-ick-ick-ick-cik!"

 

[CovertCow]

Thats really funny.

I thought about that a while ago and was laughed at by my friends.

 

[ahfung]

And how long it takes to insert the 1000 floppies?

 

[TheHorta]

<< I hope you know your going to have to find a way to run those 1000 floppy disks in 1000 floppy drives at the same time in order to have them running RAID. >>



Ahhh... trying to get me to divulge my secrets huh?!

I don't think so buddy!

Very clever. But not clever enough to outwit the ol' Horta.

 

[SCSIRAID]

You would need hearing protection to be around it...... YUK!

 

[bigbootydaddy]

fine, then i got dibs on raid-ing a bunch of zip drives together. then ill buy your company, and give out free floppy drives.

zip all the way
|
|
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V
BBD

 

[bozo1]

Bozo slaps TheHorta with a large trout.

 

[Double Trouble]

hehehe.... yeah, and you'd need a room the size of Nevada to hold your array, and it would be unbelievably slow. Don't forget, the access time of the floppy would be the bottleneck. Even if you have 1000 floppy's each writing 24 bytes at a time, they would still take a long time to spin into position....

No, the time has come for using....... casette rocorders! I can raid 10 of those puppies together with casettes and have lots of storage

Actually, I don't know why they haven't made a 10Gig &quot;memory only&quot; drive yet -- basically a drive with 20 512MB modules in it, allowing you 10G of REALLY fast storage. Can you imagine the performance??

 

[KpocAlypse]

OK, this opens up a whole can of worms..Zip RAID, Floppy RAID, etc.etc.etc.
How far can we take this one,eh? Anyway, at least you will have dependability on your side, i never had a floppy go bad.. (from 486 to the current, same old floppy)

 

[Shudder]

Jesus.. a floppy running on a 400mhz machine seems to lock the system up for a few seconds, you'd need an SMP of about 100 cpus to handle floppy raid.

COnfession: Just for kicks I defragmented the disk in my A drive one day.

 

[Mikendi]

Hmmm . . . my cousin runs a Linux server at home with only a floppy drive. Might be on to something here . . . DOH!!!!

 

[extra]

Actually, some guy in linux did this..not with 1000 of them or anything, just a handful....he also did it with cd-roms....i forget the details though it was a long time ago that i read the article

 

[BlackWob]

How many times does the rule need to be stated: No smoking crack before posting in the forum.

 

[extra]

BlackWob, don't worry, we were just enjoying the white clouds of opium. crack is bad, mmkay!

 

[Nevyn522]

Just an aside, but those &quot;memory-only&quot; drives do exist -- typically, there's a redundant power supply on 'em, and an attached hard drive -- when you shut down your computer or power is lost, then all data on the RAM is dumped to permenant storage.

 

[Leokor]

<< Sure, your average, everyday 1.44MB floppy disk drive may be slow and low capacity, but RAID, say... 1,000 of those puppies together and what do you get? 1.44 GIGABYTE of high-performance floppy heaven! Now we're talkin'.
>>


I say, tripple hurray to da mighty Floppy Raider!

Leo

 

[Slacker]

will this technology be backward compatible with 5.25 inch floppy drives? people are just throwing those things away, I'LL BE RICH!

 

[murdock2525]

BaddaBingBaddaBoom
Haul your silly ass back to the schoolroom !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Dark4ng3l]

<< You wanna talk redundant? You stipe a bunch of 36GB scorchers together and one dies, you lose 36GB of data and your array goes PFFTT! A floppy dies, you lose 1.44MB of data and the array keeps on ticking, then you just pop a 50-cent disk right in there and badda bing, badda boom, you're back in the saddle! >>



If anything in your aray(as in if a single floppy) dies you lose all the information on all the floppies(the only disadvantage I can see with data stripping)

 

[LuNoTiCK]

Come on u need redundancy, you cant make it raid 0. You need Raid 5, and scsi. Maybe a completely separate scsi controller, just for floppys. You know how much a single floppy seems to slow down a cpu. Gotta make them dma also, cause i'm not sure if floppys are. You will be set.

 

[777joee]

Long live the Horta. All you need is a brick mason to fix it.LOL

 

[randypj]

I'm with tagej and Nevyn522. I want a RAM only 10 gig drive. Heck, with the prices of RAM....

Geez....they've already got those twinkie USB keychain RAM drives. Supposed to be up to 512MB by end of summer. But, a PCI drive card wouldn't be limited by USB speed.
--Randy