Repurposing old technology to create something new and different is always interesting, even when the end result is far from practical. For example, when it comes to floppy disks, many enthusiasts have used their drives to build full orchestras, but the Action Retro channel decided to take a different path... and create a RAID 0 with dozens of USB floppy drives. On a Mac.
Floppy disks! They can bring on all the nostalgia you want, but personally I'm glad we left them behind. Why? Because the last drives that hit the market had terrible quality, and they started spitting out bad sectors after three or four uses at best. At worst, the floppies were basically "write once, read never", and they made us throw away a lot of money.
However, that means we can do strange things with them without major consequences, and that brings us to the Action Retro channel, which explores (among other things) the virtues and horrors of old Apple hardware. What does its latest video teach us? Something no one wants, but everyone needs to see: a RAID 0 with floppy drives connected to two USB hubs, using a Power Mac G4.
RAID 0 with Dozens of Floppies? Sort of...
The first step is, obviously, to test each USB drive, simply because they are not new. Four of them threw in the towel from the start, lowering the RAID's potential to 30 floppies. The most impressive thing is that Disk Utility detected the drives without issues, and even enabled the possibility of creating a RAID without hacks or mods (compared to Windows Disk Management, which starts crying if you look at it wrong).
However, not all drives cooperated in the process, and Disk Utility doesn't have the ability to report which exact drive failed, so the next step was to identify and isolate the problematic floppy drives. In the end, the hypothetical RAID 0 of 34 floppy disks dropped to 13, with a total of 16.1 megabytes available.
As for speed, the RAID 0 peaked at 310 kilobytes per second with an average of 226, but the numbers vary greatly depending on the type of operation, because then he installed a chess program, and it reached a megabyte of transfer. Of course, the program took two minutes to load, revealing the true nature of the technology in the drives (i.e., it's slow and sucks). In short, this torture device doesn't disappoint, and we hope to see more mutant experiments with floppy disks.
