USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID

RAID, If you aren’t familiar with it, stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is a system that uses multiple hard drives to share or replicate data among the drives. The benefit of RAID is one or more of increased data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput or capacity compared to single drives, in its original implementations. Its key advantage was the ability to combine multiple low-cost devices using older technology into an array that offered greater capacity, reliability, speed, or a combination of these things, than was affordably available in a single device using the newest technology.

With that, some of the guys working in the IT Department of Carroll College who had some idle time on their hands decided to do a USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID project. Equipped with an iBook (G3/700MHz, 384 MB of RAM and Runs OX 10.4.3), 13 VST Floppy Drives, and 6 USB 1.1 Hubs, they started flirting with the project.

So how did they do it? According to these guys, here are the steps that they’ve gone through just to complete the project:

1. Collected all the hubs, USB cables, and floppy drives we would need
2. Realized that it’s harder than you think to find enough floppy DISKS for all those drives
3. We connected it all up to Windows XP SP2, and although it saw all the drives and disks, we weren’t able to RAID them using any software we could find
4. Gave up on Windows
5. Fired up ye olde iBook
6. Connected all the USB hubs and drives to the iBook
7. Put floppy disks in all the drives and zeroed all of the disks and set them as Mac OS Extended format
8. We then added the disks to a new RAID that we decided to call Mega Floppy 06
9. Our RAID was formatted as Mac OS Extended and we let it sit and create
10. It successfully created and mounted our new RAID and we danced a dance of joy
11. Testing commenced

That’s quite a feat (although the setup of everything on the table is quite disorganized)! Now, maybe we should just look forward to the group’s next conquest. They would need a colossal project to top this one so good luck with that!

Via Carroll College

RAID, If you aren’t familiar with it, stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is a system that uses multiple hard drives to share or replicate data among the drives. The benefit of RAID is one or more of increased data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput or capacity compared to single drives, in its original implementations. Its key advantage was the ability to combine multiple low-cost devices using older technology into an array that offered greater capacity, reliability, speed, or a combination of these things, than was affordably available in a single device using the newest technology.

With that, some of the guys working in the IT Department of Carroll College who had some idle time on their hands decided to do a USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID project. Equipped with an iBook (G3/700MHz, 384 MB of RAM and Runs OX 10.4.3), 13 VST Floppy Drives, and 6 USB 1.1 Hubs, they started flirting with the project.

So how did they do it? According to these guys, here are the steps that they’ve gone through just to complete the project:

1. Collected all the hubs, USB cables, and floppy drives we would need
2. Realized that it’s harder than you think to find enough floppy DISKS for all those drives
3. We connected it all up to Windows XP SP2, and although it saw all the drives and disks, we weren’t able to RAID them using any software we could find
4. Gave up on Windows
5. Fired up ye olde iBook
6. Connected all the USB hubs and drives to the iBook
7. Put floppy disks in all the drives and zeroed all of the disks and set them as Mac OS Extended format
8. We then added the disks to a new RAID that we decided to call Mega Floppy 06
9. Our RAID was formatted as Mac OS Extended and we let it sit and create
10. It successfully created and mounted our new RAID and we danced a dance of joy
11. Testing commenced

That’s quite a feat (although the setup of everything on the table is quite disorganized)! Now, maybe we should just look forward to the group’s next conquest. They would need a colossal project to top this one so good luck with that!

Via Carroll College