3.5-inch floppy disk raid: why? why not?

May 22nd, 2009 comments (1) stumble it! digg it! by: lambert v.

Welcome to the latest edition of Why? Why not?, where we look at concepts and creations that exist for no real reason. Yes folks, I’m talking about products of democracy, of free will, and most of all of too much free time. Our forefathers lay down their lives so that we may spend ours coming up with these batshit insane ideas, such as the 3.5-inch USB floppy disk striped RAID setup by Daniel Blade Olson.

In very simple terms, a set of physical disks can be linked using RAID technology for the purpose of having backups and/or increased disk performance. Which gets us to our dear Mr. Olson, who happens to work for Y-E DATA, a USB floppy drive company. He tried setting up his “very important scientific feat” in WIndows XP, but the OS had more common sense than he had, and would not allow the FDD RAID. (Un)Fortunately, OS X 10.2.4 was more accommodating. The rest was a simple matter of plugging everything in and using Disk Utility to create the array.

So what can his army of floppy disks do? Store 4.22 MB of data, that’s what. It can also transfer a 3.6 MB file in 32 seconds. “Turbo lightning speed” indeed. For his next project – I swear this is still all true – Olson has totally left the boundaries of sanity and wants to create a 125 USB floppy disk drive array. My god. The drives will probably fill up his room, and will most likely have a total capacity less than 256 MB.

[via Every Joe]

filed under:  computing hacks + mods just plain fun technology

May 22nd, 2009 comments (1): stumble it! digg it! by: lambert v.