I'd expect the vast majority of IO requests to be served from the kernel's IO cache (we're talking 30 * 1.44MBs here so just under 50MB, trivial for even an old computer to hold in RAM), thus I wouldn't be surprised for it to be very fast and reliable as long as he sticks to read-only workloads - those would never actually touch the floppies beyond the initial read.
This is <i>awesome</i>. I already have some suggestions:<p>- Put a bird^H^H ZFS on it<p>- Switch to RAID10 (a stripe of mirrors), and go 2/3 floppys wide so you can have some redundancy in each mirror gropu<p>- Get some Pis (or other SBCs) and hook those up and run Ceph... if this keeps going we'll have a SAN soon enough.<p>- ZIP disks?[0]<p>Also, I don't think I ever want to hear of the "hug of death" for any site ever again -- I don't think this site hosted on 30 floppies was hugged to death.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive</a>
See also: his video about RAIDs of floppy drives (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8</a>).
turn off the error reporting so you get whats read rather than an error interrupt and watch the bitrot. Never did that in linux but it wouldn't surprise me if its a driver option.
There's an accompanying video as well:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8</a>
I'm surprised this actually still works. As far as I remember those floppies were super unreliable.<p>Though this may have been caused by me being in school and having to buy crappy white label ones. Couldn't afford those fancy imation ones with all the games I copied lol.
This looks like it's a page about a related project, and has a video of the RAID in action: <a href="https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-raid-with-floppy-drives/" rel="nofollow">https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-raid-with-floppy-drives/</a>
i'd be also interested in hosting a website on 1 floppy drive, including OS.
<a href="https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-floppy/" rel="nofollow">https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-...</a>
Hahaha, not for long; not on the front page of HN…I can see it’s got the old ‘Hug of Death’, but I’m curious to how long it lasted and how loud the result was.
project is awesome.<p>Also-<p>Tell me you're into Chiodos without telling me you're into Chiodos.<p>Big ol dose of nostalgia listening to your old metalcore tracks.
Imagine a floppy disk based old server surviving “Hug of deaths” while the latest react based static website hosted on Kubernetes for infinite scalability on baremetal dies in like 5 sec.