Hosting a Website From the Floppy Drive RAID

Thanks PCBWay.com - Today we're taking the Floppy Disk RAID even further, using the power of Void Linux on my Power Mag G5 Quad! Let's RAID together 30 floppy disks, host a website on them, and serve it up to the open internet!
What can go wrong? Nothing, of course!
🍎 RAID explainer: • IT in Three: What is R...
🍎 The Wayback Machine picked up the site lol: web.archive.org/web/202207151...
🍎 mdadm guide: raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.ph...
🍎 How I circumvented the I/O cache, which is a very silly thing to do: serverfault.com/questions/302...
🍎 ext4 without journaling: www.quora.com/Ext4-Is-it-poss...
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💾 For more vintage Apple stuff, please subscribe: kzbin.info?s...
💾 Support these retro computing shenanigans on Patreon! / actionretro
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🔧 Tool kit I use: amzn.to/31kquDi
🔨 The best Mac Cracker! amzn.to/2QiHjIl
🎙️ My microphone: amzn.to/32NBLgh
🎥 My camera (good for CRTs): amzn.to/33GpF7K
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💬 Come talk about old computers on the BitBang Social Mastodon! bitbang.social
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#VoidLinux #PowerPC #Floppies

[@JeffGeerling]

I wonder if you could build a ceph cluster across two or three macs with the floppies distributed across them to get a few hundred KB/sec more throughput.

[@only1gameguru]

You'd need to ensure the floppy drives are properly powered.

[@chunye215]

I'd bet it's less, given that ceph only has two modes of operation: Rebalancing or broken.

[@JeffGeerling]

@@chunye215 heh

[@ActionRetro]

This is the kind of thinking I can get behind

[@hicknopunk]

I love this insanity

[@mini_bomba]

Fun fact: you could've shortened listing all those devices to a simple /dev/sd{b..j} to specify all devices between sdb and sdj (or /dev/sd{{a..z},a{a..e}} for the 30 floppy array, to specify all devices between sda and sdz plus devices between sdaa and sdae) This is called brace expansion and it's awesome

[@lztx]

It's so trippy having /dev/sda etc for floppy drives. I was expecting /dev/fd0 etc. But I guess that's USB storage

[@lnxrox]

Long ago sd* was SCSI device now its just all block devices.

[@W1ldTangent]

@@lnxrox I'm old enough to still remember having computers with IDE drives where it would be named /dev/hda, /dev/sda didn't come along for me until my first SATA drive.

[@TylerFurrison]

@@W1ldTangent Yeah, I was expecting the drive I was installing Arch on to be /dev/hda, it was sda

[@_lun4r_]

9:10 fun fact: when you do a command and get a "permission denied", you can just run "sudo !!" to repeat the last issued command with root privileges instead of having to just retype everything with "sudo" prepended to it

[@_lun4r_]

@Nny yes

[@MrJef06]

Cool trick, although I personally use almost exclusively Ctrl-r to recall commands.

[@jamesdecross1035]

That noise... it's quite incredible! It's like an old 1950s Supercomputer for a Victorian child's Dolls House, probably selling Lyon's tea and cakes.

[@ctrlaltrees]

I can never find a working floppy disk when I need one and you're saying you managed to round up 30!? Great mix of madness and tech as always 😁

[@alexandruianu8432]

I'm more surprised about most USB drives surviving. You can still buy new old stock floppies in bulk from reliable brands.

[@SenileOtaku]

it's entirely possible to find 30 working floppy disks these days, you just need a stack of 200 to select from.

[@CTimmerman]

@@alexandruianu8432 Last i read Cold War nukes still used actual floppies, not these newfangled diskettes.

[@alexandruianu8432]

@@CTimmerman Those are better. Even higher quality overall, and lower flux density needed.

[@readtedium]

Keep buying USB floppy drives until your basement is full of them and see what happens. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? Seriously though, this is brilliant, and your best video yet. The floppy drapes were a nice touch.

[@davidconnorsands]

I'd have to agree. He's really tinkered his way into something amazing here! I wonder what the average raid size was back in the day... Other videos are a lot of fun too :)

[@Mainyehc]

Why not making a partnership with the guy from Floppotron? When not playing music, all those drives could be a server 😂

[@chad3814]

@@Mainyehc a web server serving the music from the floppotron

[@TeraunceFoaloke]

It's hilarious the way back machine caught this.

[@adventureoflinkmk2]

Ope

[@repatch43]

This is so incredibly cool! Next thing? How about a RAID array with DVD-RAM drives and disks!

[@user-gi5lq2xl4p]

ZFS works, I put 4 in a RAID.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

eeproms

[@dgpsf]

You are such a fun guy, and I have been really enjoying your channel especially since your smiling face replaced the disembodied gesticulating hands! :D I don't think there's anyone else who comes close to your formula of genuine love of 'vintage' tech with interesting "modding" content. I really like that you don't fret about making everything stock (that's pretty boring), but instead, push pretty much every machine to its limit. Frequently starting with "cursed" already-modded machines - which makes the question of whether it's "ok" to "damage" the "museum-piece" specimen totally moot. And these silly videos that you've been into lately like this one are a good angle as well. Anyway, thanks for reading this, if you do!

[@smallmoneysalvia]

If you add the mount option “sync”, it’ll skip the file buffer and write straight to the floppies (though there will still be a read buffer, which is more difficult to disable without it being system-wide). This will make for more floppy grinding goodness when writing files. You can also disable atime and relatime to improve performance (Access time/relative access time attributes). “mount -o sync,noatime,norelatime /dev/md0 /srv/www/apache”

[@GeeFunk84]

For once, I was really hoping Raid: Shadow Legends would sponsor this video.

[@krunkcleanup2949]

When you started pulling out the floppys, I half expected your computer to tell you "My mind is going. I can feel it."

[@diakritika]

"Daisy, Da-ii-sss-yyyy…." :)

[@nfistfu]

I love how incredibly useless this is on all fronts. Like you can just buy a 4GB USB drive that would have more storage, run faster, take less space, be more reliable, cost less, require less USB hubs, use less power, take less effort to format, and make less sound... But, where's the fun? XD

[@wayland7150]

It's quite informative to show how far the tech has evolved.

[@OhhCrapGuy]

One of the best parts of doing something like this is actually how many problems show up almost immediately so you can understand more of how RAID levels work and what goes wrong with them. You could configure regular spinny hard disks into a raid, but those problems might not show up for YEARS, and when they show up, now you gotta figure out how to fix that problem. But after doing something horrific like this, you probably know how to fix almost any problem that might come up

[@leedogg90002]

Seeing an OS installed on Mega Floppy would be cool. Maybe Windows XP or 7 or something? I'd figure Windows 10 would require way too many floppies. Edit: I remember a while back seeing a video from Michael MJD about something called Tiny 7 that installed on 50 mb so that may be possible?

[@plur90]

Mac OS 9 in classic mode running off a zip disk array sounds like something I'd like to try xD and an edit of my own: nLite can be used to customize windows installers, I used it to merge SP4 into my copy of Win2kPro then kept re-using that ISO image for a few years

[@adventureoflinkmk2]

Oooh, tiny 7? I gotta give that a go on one of my retro PCs

[@SuperDavidEF]

I don't know about Tiny 7. I've never heard of it. But the original XP could be installed in under 200MB without any modification. It's the Service Packs that eventually made it take into the GBs of disk space.

[@Scyth3934]

I think it said there was only 22.3 megabytes free was because you didn't empty the Trash and actually delete the audio files.

[@jimian2007]

I'm glad Druaga1 got mentioned in your video! I'm his fan~ When you mentioned a 'RAID expert', I originally thought Druaga1 would make a cameo 😅

[@adventureoflinkmk2]

Druaga1 with all his smokers ;) EDIT: oh yeah and all of his S S DEEEEEEEEs

[@photoniccannon2117]

6:23 "YOLO these into a raid" - I'm gonna have to steal that one lmao

[@majoryoshi]

if you wanted to install windows 11 on a floppy raid you’d need 180 usb CONTROLLERS full of floppies, plus an additional 23 floppies. Ubuntu afaik can be installed on 8GB partitions if not smaller, so that’d be a measly 44 usb controllers. Glad i’m not doing this 😅 Edit: Apparently FreeBSD can be installed on 7GB if you use a ram disk for your /tmp. Still 39 USB controllers of floppies

[@SuperDavidEF]

There are linux operating systems that are tiny. Some in the past could even be installed on a single floppy. Those probably aren't very interesting, but a small distro like Puppy or TinyCore would be totally doable on a floppy RAID (at least for the size, whether the hardware lets it happen or not is another matter) and would actually make for a fully functional computer once running. I'd be interested in seeing that done!

[@xerzy]

@@SuperDavidEF I personally would do either SliTaz or a custom build of something like Alpine

[@majoryoshi]

@@SuperDavidEF Honestly you have a good point on that, I'm just not all that familiar with Puppy or TinyCore, which is why I didn't mention it since the main concern we have here is space limitations

[@TheLukemcdaniel]

Why controllers? It's not like they'd be anywhere near saturating usb's bandwidth. Could easily use several hubs with only a few controllers.

[@majoryoshi]

@@TheLukemcdaniel USB maxes out at 127 devices per controller. If USB didn't have a limit on devices per controller you'd probably be able to get away with doing it on one controller, but unfortunately other limitations exist

[@diondais4057]

I lost it when you turned the cache off 🤣

[@supernoob17]

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

[@jeremiefaucher-goulet3365]

Now we neeed to see hotswappingn demonstrated, and resilvering of a lost floppy (RAID5)

[@chunye215]

The sync command in that loop was unnecessary, it might be more effective to look into disabling the page cache for that specific drive/mount, or maybe just entirely, since the system isn't doing much else anyways. For running an OS off of it, I think it would be most interesting to just use a VM, and pass it md0 directly as the virtual HDD. That way, (assuming you manage to get a lot more drives as you plan to), you could run win95 from that thing and play some retro games. Should be way more interesting than just barely fitting a trimmed down modern Linux distro in there for the sake of having it bare metal. You probably have to give up on the G5 for that though.

[@machinerin151]

Don't need to give up on the G5 for it. KVM is perfectly capable of emulating x86 on powerpc.

[@chunye215]

@@machinerin151 kvm cannot emulate other CPU architectures, it's just virtualization. You need something like qemu for that. I have no idea how well optimized x86 emulation on PowerPC Linux is though. Might be worth a try if you go for early win95 gaming at most.

[@RudysRetroIntel]

Fun times!! Thanks for sharing

[@spartman]

Great vid. Love the doctors shirt!

[@a4e69636b]

Excellent video! Thank you.

[@dollardealtech768]

21:10 This sounds like an awesome idea. Would love to see a video on that.

[@RikerJoe]

Insane retro hackery, Sean!

[@KrooTon]

This is delightfully weird, thank you for putting to video something I always imagined (raiding floppies for access speed), and wondered was something that could possibly work... Never convinced myself it'd be worth the time or effort 😆

[@glebealyth]

When I say, "You're a nutcase!", płease take it as the compliment it is meant to be. That was insane. Thank you very much!

[@The4Crawler]

Many decades ago, I was using an Intel 8080 development system. This was a large box with 4 - 8" floppy drives and a monitor. I think it ran some Intel disk operating system similar to CP/M and had assembly and high level compilers, debuggers, etc. Once you started building large programs, it was horrendously slow, at least trying to run off the boot floppy. Spent a lot of time trying to speed up the process and finally stumbled on the key. There was a "radial head load" jumper on the floppy drives. When that jumper was installed, if any drive was accessed, all 4 drive heads would load onto the disc and be ready to go. Then it was just a matter of spreading the various pieces of software among the drives. I think it ended up with O/S on the boot drive, compilers on another drive, source code on a 3rd and output files on the 4th. When you started a compile, there was a loud thunk as all 4 heads hit the deck then all you heard was the faint sound of the heads moving in and out and saw the various drive lights blinking on and off. It was such a huge speed improvement, since switching drives was instantaneous. Probably no way to do that with USB drives as each has it's own controller and they don't know about the other drives.

[@MendenLama]

Thumbs up! I didn't know that Void Linux exists for the Powerpc. On their website they are only promoting Void for the X86 and ARM platforms.

[@HelloKittyFanMan.]

THIS is why I love the stuff of KZbin! Thank you!

[@panopolis8051]

If this isn't a computer shenanigan, I don't know what is

[@aaroncook7709]

You are literally insane... and I love it.

[@CTimmerman]

Looks like a cool way to demo RAID types and ZFS and such. Normal people would pay their favorite big brother to back up their data, but if they happen to have old drives this might be safer.

[@partycatplays]

You might have better performance from ext2, it skips the journal and a lot of extra features that will just hinder you in this setup

[@rptube16]

But then you won't be able to store files dated after 2038. You don't want to kill those floppies prematurely, do you?

[@shawnmulligan3471]

Also, mounting with noatime probably would help, so it's not writing file access times constantly. In fact once the content is put onto the drives it could be mounted with ro so it doesn't ever write to it (except for some flags at mount time unfortunately). ActionRetro, without metadata on the RAID, I believe what happens is that the RAID doesn't know anything about itself, and entirely depends on the mdadm command to assemble and start it. Normally you can tell mdadm to "find and mount arrays" and it uses the metadata to do that; in this case you'll have to specify the exact mdadm command in the /etc/mdadm.conf file for it to find / assemble it at boot; and if you lose a drive, good luck figuring out how to repair it without the metadata, but fun for experiments in any case!

[@gatts205]

I think the best part of the video is how the tower of floppies looks like it could fall at any moment

[@only1gameguru]

What hath god wrought, Also great to see powered USB hubs for the floppies.

[@aerodigital]

RAID 5... "Oh, he's tryin" best ever

[@GodSaveTheUnitedStates]

The ultimate OG nerd flex. No one else could or would try this except the 1990's era nerd. This is not an insult, I'm genuinely jealous that I've never thought to try this.

[@pawouapproval984]

this was legendary..... great tunes as well

[@mountainmanmcbeachfront5296]

Classic Macs, Jeep Cherokees and The Descendants. This channel is awesome lol

[@TCOphox]

18:28 Literally that scene of HAL-9000's shutdown lol.

[@kaitlyn__L]

I was thinking that too, heh

[@TechnologyNToys]

This dude’s about to build a mainframe-style masterpiece of just floppies

[@DavidStahlOLDHAPPyMACs]

Sean You Are A Mad Man Great Video

[@TechieZeddie]

Can you do a benchmark on the floppy raid? I wonder how fast a single drive performs and if doing a RAID 0 would performance scale?

[@aswxwing]

Back in the day, I made the frontpage of SlashDot with a stupid build. I had 10.4 running alongside KDE in an X11 window. I can't remember exactly how I did it, but it could be a fun project for you to attempt. It was very silly having two UIs running side by side.

[@WalterMan]

Yes another video of the Mega Floppy!

[@douglasmannor6510]

This is so cool, the reason you get my sub and views!

[@xenotiic8356]

Legendary as always!

[@CaelThunderwing]

XD it's up on Wayback Machine!

[@chumbusthings]

Theres only a limited amount of time before this guy single-handedly brings Floppy’s back

[@ActionRetro]

Can't bring floppies back if I'm hoarding all of them 😅

[@chunye215]

@@ActionRetro well then, worldwide floppy shortage it is.

[@draggonhedd]

I saw this on reddit last night, you got the hug of death real fast.

[@Dolinmyster]

And here I am digging through boxes to try to find my USB floppy disk drive, and you've just got a stack of them that you're abusing in the best of ways!

[@alexgameroom]

I don't need no booze or drugs , I just chug-a-lug-o my... 30 floopy drive raid?

[@robertchamberlin2362]

Awesome loved it!!!!

[@RockeyDAproductions]

Holy crap I need a link to the video where you set this up!

[@Jordan4Ibanez]

That was truly amazing

[@tikkasen_urakointi]

I wrote a 16-bit multitasking system and a TCP/IP stack and set up a http server using it and a 486 computer. Initially the website was served from a 360 kB 5,25" floppy disk, but I then installed a hard disk to the computer and now the website is on the hard disk. The main problem with floppies is that it takes a while to spin up the disk. After the floppy disk is already spinning, the bandwidth is about 30 kB/s, which is more than good enough for a web server.

[@cowonsle]

its such a weird way to host a website but its entertaining

[@MichaelAStanhope]

This has to be the dumbest, most ridiculous thing that has ever been on KZbin! I approve! I laughed my ass off the whole time!

[@benotsilent6703]

"currently at 30-40 requests per second" - a 1991 BBS would eat it's heart out.

[@rickkarrer8370]

Another great video. I think I have 4+ Zip drives around here somewhere...

[@ActionRetro]

RAID em!

[@KalleKilponen]

You should really replace that packing tape on the G5 with some construction tape or similar that doesn't leave glue residue or marks. Regular packing tape will leave nasty marks if left for too long.

[@Mack-op1vw]

Well, that was pretty cool!

[@mightyowl_252]

casually dropping druaga1 lol

[@greenphlem]

Love the Milo/Descendants shirt bro

[@TheBasementChannel]

More quirks in that stack of drives than a Doug demero video

[@Kikay0n]

This is great dood

[@user-ye3ol4jc6o]

you're a crazy fanatic))

[@stabbedboxfilms]

FINALLY the sequel

[@halfsourlizard9319]

Looking forward to the sequel where you do this ... but with 8-inch floppies.

[@papajekket]

Absolute madman!

[@DamianMontero]

hearing "things are about to get weird" So I cooked some pop-corn and watched! Wasn't disappointed!

[@RETROMachines]

I was really hoping Raid Legend would sponsor this video.

[@DJBisGOD]

Some people have too much time on their hands lol. Honestly though it was fun to watch :)

[@frankwhite2072]

I never thought I'd hear someone be excited about 43MB again.

[@CodeProfessor]

As you were counting the drives, all I could think of was Count von Count.

[@ArisAlamanos]

that was AWESOME

[@Mainyehc]

This has got to be one of the most ridiculous, pointless and funniest things I’ve ever seen. Keep it up! 😂

[@cameronschluchtner]

Does action retro have an XJ? I love this channel

[@ripper253]

What I wanna know is if you run a RAID with redundancy like 5 or 6, how well it'll rebuild the array when you pull out a floppy and put in a fresh one (or a whole drive when it's not a team player)

[@eliasjachniuk4427]

This was so painful, raid 0 and ext without journaling, thanks for the nightmares

[@hgesser]

Not only was this very entertaining, but I've also learned something new: how counting drives goes on after /dev/sdz with /dev/sdaa, /dev/sdab etc., so thanks for that :-) Do you happen to have a listing of the /dev directory that shows the major/minor device IDs for all those drives?

[@W1ldTangent]

It gets quite confusing when you're working with 45 or 60-drive JBOD chassis.

[@natethefighter]

I GUFFAWED when you turned off the cache

[@flyicestormpluto]

I'm honestlly surprized that it workd !

[@trimble-tech]

2:21 totally expected this guy to draw a circle...

[@sfacets]

Can you do this with ZFS next?

[@johnson42069]

the first human I've seen use void Linux in real life besides myself (I use debian now since 2 weeks after I started using void.)

[@Uejji]

This is suuuuper pedantic, but what RAID 5 provides is *parity* , not redundancy. It allows for the use of CPU time to compensate for a single missing or corrupted stripe of data. If you specifically want *redundancy* , ie a second fully intact copy of your data to protect against not only hardware failure but also bit rot, bitflips and other forms of silent data corruption (which RAID 5 is not as effective against), you would want to use RAID 1 (or RAID 10).

[@eDoc2020]

RAID 1 by itself provides no protection against silent data corruption, just as RAID 5 doesn't.

[@Uejji]

Corrupted data on a physical drive will be detected because the data no longer passes the drive's internal CRC check and will reported as an error. Depending on your RAID hardware and/or software implementation, this may be corrected automatically or during a manual or scheduled array consistency check by reading the block from the mirror and rewriting the bad block. It's not perfect, but it at least gives your data a chance to survive.

[@hanro50]

Linux:"I am not sure why it is supported. But here we are"

[@MegamanEXEv2]

I loaded this up on my G3 iMac when it got posted to the Low End Mac Facebook group

[@MrMarianoamigo]

this is madness!!!!

[@msuc5vette]

There are so many funny aspects to this video. Using a Mac that is at least the third generation AFTER Apple killed the floppy on their machines is so ironic. Having this many floppies is hilarious in itself, but I didn’t even realize you could hook up so many USB devices. I remember when people would compare hard drive space or thumb drive space to a floppy count. To actually visualize 32 floppy disks functioning as a unit is hilarisous. It’s like a 40MB hard drive.

[@omfgbunder2008]

I always thought those USB drives cached the floppy until eject?

[@JakeHancke]

Subscribed for the Descendents shirt

[@maka7992]

I want to see a proper Floppy ZFS Pool 👍

[@AndrewMackoul]

Now do DVD raid. That'll probably be more reliable and maybe even more useful today.

[@user-gi5lq2xl4p]

You can do DVD-RAM RAID but it's expensive at $10/disk.

[@nemesisgay]

Best channel on KZbin!

[@Tinkerer_Red]

Lost the idea of using modern software on outdated hardware. Always end up with surprisingly interesting results.