"Why: Why not?"

Indeed.

Floppy disk drive RAID.
- jim 5-08-2004 5:52 pm

I know RAID has to do with distributing computation among an array of machines. Is it for extra processing power? Virtual memory? As opposed to storage? Is what this guy is doing useful on some level, or just a kind of low tech parody of what bigger machines do? Please help us semi-techs.
- tom moody 5-08-2004 8:27 pm


Sorry. Yeah, it's pretty much parody. We're talking about mass storage. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or sometimes Inexpensive) Disks. Using RAID you can make multiple hard drives look like one hard drive to the operating system. So, even though the biggest disk you can buy right now (that I know of) is 500 gigs, you could use RAID to connect 4 500 gig drives to your computer, and your operating system would see them as one 2 terabyte drive.

But it's a little more complicated than that, because there are lots of different flavors of RAID. You can have it set up as I described above. In this case you get maximum storage, and you also get faster performance than with a single drive because parts of one file are stored on all four drives - so when you access that file, all the drives are spitting out the pieces at top speed (so theoretically 4 times faster than a single drive if the file is split evenly over the four drives - but of course there is overhead, so it's not that good.) This is called striping because the data is striped over all available drives.

But you can also set up RAID to mirror all data. In this case our OS would see the four 500 gig drives as one *1* terabyte drive (500 * 4 / 2). All data written to this "drive" is stored on two of the drives, and then an identical copy is stored on the other two drives. This way, even if a drive fails, you don't lose data.

And then there are all manner of combinations of these two. Mirroring is safest. Striping gets you maximum speed and size. Mixing the two allows you to tune for any particular need.

All serious servers are set up with RAID.

This guys project is sort of a joke because there really is no point in setting up floppy drives in a RAID. I mean, you'd get all the same benefits, but it's still just floppies. (Way cheaper to just buy a single hard drive.) On the other hand, it's very cool in a geeky "because I can" sort of way. Somewhat akin to trying to make a super computer by hooking a million commodore 64s in parallel.
- jim 5-08-2004 11:20 pm


Thanks. I thought it was a parody, or a goof--I just wanted to make sure it wasn't the computing equivalent of discovering cold fusion.

- tom moody 5-08-2004 11:31 pm





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