Action Retro has a video with floppies: https://youtu.be/1hc52_PWeU8
He also references a MacWorld article with Daniel's array: https://www.macworld.com/article/165663/floppyraid.html
Need to see if someone can hack together RAID on cassettes on an old Apple II
Two thoughts come to mind, one not serious, one serious.
1. I can’t imagine having to align the counters on all those tapes.
2. I’m guessing this would really only work for sequential reading and writing. In some ways that makes it more fun as the latency would be that much worse.
#it has been a few years I don't remember if it works with bare drives or if you need a disklabel on each floppy
bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
#the raid will show up now, check dmesg
disklabel -E sd5
newfs /dev/sd5a
mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy/
umount /mnt/floppy
bioctl -d sd5
#after inserting all floppies reassemble the raid
bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy
One day in what was probably sullen resentment that openbsd has no equivalent to DRBD I assembled a raid on iscsi drives, that is, initiate 5 iscsi sessions to independent hosts then assemble a raid with them. and you can imagine my surprise when it very nearly worked, I could read and write just fine. The part that did not work was drive failure. My guess is that iscsid did not fail a drive in a way that softraid understood. so a drive failure just lead to everything hanging.
Yeah:)
> Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
- Doug Gwyn
Agree! My first thought while reading the article was that it would be very easy to do this on OpenBSD as well, either with USB floppies or normal 34-pin drives as well.
OpenBSD's softraid stack doesn't care much about what the underlying hardware is as long as it looks like a disk and talks like a disk.
That was my big problem with the economics of tape. the drives are expensive and don't really last that long. At some scale factor tape makes sense, but it is larger than you would naively think.
As there is no good solution for personal scale long term archive type storage, I have sort of given up on it. Actual long term archives take the form of human readable printed documents. However this is very low density. so only the most important stuff. long term bulk storage is live, hard drives based arrays and backups, requiring an active maintainer it will die when I do, but no great loss, it is mostly junk anyhow.
One of my 'friends' is very capitalist and it makes him actually angry that people spend so much time on something that doesn't make money. I find it sad that he doesn't understand the concept of fun. And he has plenty of money.
Now if you are stripping... Well... then sure the data loss is your own fault, you have taken the R out of RAID.
rideontime•9mo ago