7 ms·

I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives

290 points by LarryPage 4y ago

bennyp101 4y ago
The parcel tape holding bits together is just chefs kiss
dcambie 4y ago
Interesting stats at http://totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net/server-status http://totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net/server-status
random_savv 4y ago
Interesting user name
eimrine 4y ago
So fast website, is it possible to shrink it to one floppy for seeing some slowingness?
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  It's RAID0. If the OP shrank it to one floppy, it would become faster and more reliable.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    RAID0 adds both speed and capacity.
AnnikaL 4y ago
See also: his video about RAIDs of floppy drives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8).
- dylan604 4y ago
  Were the "power my car" and "shingle my roof" bits funny? Is this the level of YT videos to get likes?
  - LarryPage 4y ago
    I just do whatever I want
    - dylan604 4y ago
      That's fine, but being a social platform, I assume everyone is a caricature of themselves. Other creators have discussed here the near moronic poster/thumb images getting more clicks vs less overly dramatic versions. So at this point, I assume that the closer to a program that would fit in Idiocracy television programming is the ultimate goal to get those precious likes.
      - LarryPage 4y ago
        I know it's fine, because they're my videos and I can do whatever I want in them lol
        dylan604 4y ago
        okay, so you're not a caricature of yourself and it's really you
        LarryPage 4y ago
        yes, correct!
  - Ayesh 4y ago
    Yeah those two parts, and those forced laughs came out a bit sour to me too, but it was entertaining watch nonetheless.
a_c 4y ago
Well, did we just hug it to death? Hope the floppies are doing fine... Look forward to an update
- vimsee 4y ago
  Turns out it was not built to handle the load of a "frontpage of hackernews" situation, hehe.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    I doubt most "home" level servers could unless they were serving up nothing but a short text file.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  Where is the linux page cache when you need it
GekkePrutser 4y ago
I'm surprised this actually still works. As far as I remember those floppies were super unreliable. 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.
AddingValue 4y ago
Well guess not anymore, because the article is down?
UberFly 4y ago
I'm guessing the floppies are melting right about now.
h2odragon 4y ago
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.
Nextgrid 4y ago
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.
- reustle 4y ago
  If we hit a lot of random sub folder URLs (that should all 404), would that trigger the webserver to check the drive to see if the file exists and skip the cache?
  - jewel 4y ago
    No. The cache is at the block layer, not the file/directory layer. So the filesystem will look up the directory structure, which will be cached.
    - asveikau 4y ago
      On top of the block layer cache there's also the namei cache for filename to inode lookups, I'm not sure if that covers a file not found case or just a success path, but it may apply here too.
      - bch 4y ago
        Still backed by block layer cache for (hopefully) quick response regardless of outcome
        danachow 4y ago
        What block layer cache?
        bch 4y ago
MikeAshley178 4y ago
Wonder how long until I can ruin it with Python and Requests. P.S I am not going to and I am drunk.
game-of-throws 4y ago
You're playing with fire using RAID0. If I had data on 30 floppy drives, I'd want at least 20 of them to be parity drives.
- muhammadusman 4y ago
  that's the point, RAID0 is for speed only
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > RAID0 is for speed only In this case, the theoretical maximum bandwidth is 24MBit/s. The problem is the old, slow usb bottleneck. I'm not sure how much faster, probably hundreds of bps rather than under 24, but a faster RAID0 rig would be to instead have 30x Mac G4 Digital Audios connected via gigabit switch, and share then RAID0 the internal floppies. It would also have whatever advantage running an XGrid PPC cluster on Tiger might provide. These boxes also ran PPC Ubuntu; no doubt Linux would eek out a dozen or so more bps, plus beowulf.
    - VLM 4y ago
      I don't know about that BW claim. Back when mp3 was new and computers usually had floppy drives I did the obvious and mp3 bitrates above 64K or so tended to stutter and significantly below 64K did not stutter. Something like voice encoded at 32K sounded at least as good as a phone and played back off a 1.44 floppy and IIRC that was about the best that could be done. You will probably be surprised how long an audio recording can be, if its voice at a low rate on one floppy. If you go variable bit rate and silence detection I subjectively remember "ten minutes" was quite reasonable on a 1.44 disk. Extrapolating from historical experience, thirty or so in parallel should push over half a meg/sec quite reliably. If you record speech onto a floppy drive off a cheap mic you'll record the sound of the floppy in the recording, which is funny to me. I wish I still had those files. Useless, of course, but would be funny.
      - kalleboo 4y ago
ryanmarr 4y ago
I've got a Power Mac G5 sitting right beside me if someone else wants to buy it and get into this G5 floppy website business.
- drewzero1 4y ago
  Me too. We could start a webring! I just need about 27 more USB floppy drives.
  - millzlane 4y ago
    But where will you put are the Warez?
- anaganisk 4y ago
  Yo, are you serious about that? This feels so interesting.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  That’s more the Zip drive era isn’t it?
  - enduser 4y ago
    Yup
hk1337 4y ago
That has to be one noisy room.
- iasay 4y ago
  Probably quieter than the DL360 I bought a few months ago and put on eBay after two hours :)
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    Oh, is that the one with like 10 1" fans spinning at 8,000 RPM, so that it sounds like a Harrier jet coming in for a landing?
    - iasay 4y ago
      That’s a very accurate description!
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      > 8,000 RPM Usually it's way, way more: https://store.supermicro.com/server-accessories/fans.html?fan_size=616 https://store.supermicro.com/server-accessories/fans.html?fa...
      - kstrauser 4y ago
        Who wouldn’t want that in their living room? Oof.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    Oh god, flashbacks to an early 2000s machine room absolutely full of the bastards. Thankfully, all entrance doors had an earplug dispenser...
  - aldrich 4y ago
    Haha, the good old DL360. That fan noise was loud. Let alone the spinning, whining 15k SCSI disks..
throwaway742 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220715175852if_/http://totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net/megafloppy.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20220715175852if_/http://totally...
- fny 4y ago
  Also https://archive.ph/OzYfT https://archive.ph/OzYfT
layer8 4y ago
Let’s coordinate our web accesses so that it sounds like Floppotron playing the Imperial March.
mikedelago 4y ago
There's an accompanying video as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8
- rovr138 4y ago
  I want to see this hosted from them
iasay 4y ago
I can hear that dying from here. Anyone want to try RAID0 on QIC tapes?
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  The main jpeg seems dead already, not Rendering on Firefox mobile.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  gonna take some kernel hacking to stretch timeouts or a restricted access pattern to avoid seeking, I think.
tolstoshev 4y ago
The song's not bad!
mmh0000 4y ago
I've corrected the title: "I was hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives — now my house is on fire"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. I am trying to get to the store for a few min already (from France) and I lost hope.
CodeWriter23 4y ago
For my next trick, a website hosted on a RAID0 Array of 60 RAM Disks.
- zepearl 4y ago
  We need details - what about ECC yes/no + un/buffered + raid tech (mdadm/zfs/hardware X/...)? Nothing is simple :D
anaganisk 4y ago
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.
- murukesh_s 4y ago
  The blame would be on baremetal server. They would move to AWS with multi region EKS clusters and RDS with cross-region disaster recovery. And a multi-cloud strategy is also in place..
  - anaganisk 4y ago
    And edge caching on cloudflare or cloudfront.
    - turdnagel 4y ago
      Well, edge caching would almost certainly be enough with a decently high TTL. You don't need all that other junk :)
- fny 4y ago
  Imagine indeed. This has been suffocated already it seems. Images can't even finish loading.
  - anaganisk 4y ago
    It stayed alive as long it could start going black carbon, much longer than others I think.
  - p4bl0 4y ago
    Images do not fully load but here I am 35 minutes after you and the website still responds. That's already better than many.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
DontchaKnowit 4y ago
project is awesome. Also- Tell me you're into Chiodos without telling me you're into Chiodos. Big ol dose of nostalgia listening to your old metalcore tracks.
- justbaker 4y ago
  That was one of my favorite bands as a kid, looooved All's Well That Ends Well.
ISL 4y ago
This is amazing. Website exceeded the high expectations set by the title.
shortformblog 4y ago
Sean rules and this may be his craziest experiment yet. That’s all.
deelowe 4y ago
Not anymore!
- rkagerer 4y ago
  <sigh> HackerNews we just can't give you anything nice.
fsiefken 4y ago
i'd be also interested in hosting a website on 1 floppy drive, including OS. https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-floppy/ https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-...
Zachsa999 4y ago
Site seems to be really slow currently.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lizardactivist 4y ago
I can't even imagine what defragmenting that file-system would sound like.
emiliog07 4y ago
tablespoon 4y ago
This looks like it's a page about a related project, and has a video of the RAID in action: https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-raid-with-floppy-drives/ https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-raid-with-floppy-drives/
Pakdef 4y ago
LoL is all I can think of
la64710 4y ago
5.1/4 inch or 3.5 inch ones?
aliqot 4y ago
pause on the audio doesnt work.
dpedu 4y ago
How much power do the floppy drives draw? I can't decide if it would be more or less than 30 period hard drives.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
This is awesome. I already have some suggestions: - Put a bird^H^H ZFS on it - Switch to RAID10 (a stripe of mirrors), and go 2/3 floppys wide so you can have some redundancy in each mirror gropu - Get some Pis (or other SBCs) and hook those up and run Ceph... if this keeps going we'll have a SAN soon enough. - ZIP disks?[0] 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. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
notnmeyer 4y ago
all i want to do is see this site :( > Server uptime: 20 seconds > Server load: 157.41 158.15 155.66 oh
- Titan2189 4y ago
  Where did you get that information from? I tried loading the site multiple times, but it times out / exhausted my patience
  - notnmeyer 4y ago
    OP had posted a link to a stats page
effnorwood 4y ago
pulketo 4y ago
I wish I have a dumb idea someday... And win some money
lostgame 4y ago
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.
IncRnd 4y ago
https://archive.ph/OzYfT https://archive.ph/OzYfT
FesterCluck 4y ago
Totally dig the track, brings back memories.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ychompinator 4y ago
xony 4y ago
geerlingguy 4y ago
Today there's a follow-up video: https://youtu.be/PGWpGMrroi8 https://youtu.be/PGWpGMrroi8
mbfg 4y ago
and..... the most unsurprising thing ever.....

290 points by LarryPage 4y ago

The parcel tape holding bits together is just chefs kiss

Interesting stats at http://totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net/server-status http://totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net/server-status

random_savv 4y ago

Interesting user name

eimrine 4y ago

So fast website, is it possible to shrink it to one floppy for seeing some slowingness?

marcosdumay 4y ago
It's RAID0. If the OP shrank it to one floppy, it would become faster and more reliable.
- eimrine 4y ago
  RAID0 adds both speed and capacity.

AnnikaL 4y ago

See also: his video about RAIDs of floppy drives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8).

dylan604 4y ago
Were the "power my car" and "shingle my roof" bits funny? Is this the level of YT videos to get likes?
- LarryPage 4y ago
  I just do whatever I want
  - dylan604 4y ago
    That's fine, but being a social platform, I assume everyone is a caricature of themselves. Other creators have discussed here the near moronic poster/thumb images getting more clicks vs less overly dramatic versions. So at this point, I assume that the closer to a program that would fit in Idiocracy television programming is the ultimate goal to get those precious likes.
    - LarryPage 4y ago
      I know it's fine, because they're my videos and I can do whatever I want in them lol
      - dylan604 4y ago
        okay, so you're not a caricature of yourself and it's really you
        LarryPage 4y ago
        yes, correct!
- Ayesh 4y ago
  Yeah those two parts, and those forced laughs came out a bit sour to me too, but it was entertaining watch nonetheless.

a_c 4y ago

Well, did we just hug it to death? Hope the floppies are doing fine... Look forward to an update

vimsee 4y ago
Turns out it was not built to handle the load of a "frontpage of hackernews" situation, hehe.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I doubt most "home" level servers could unless they were serving up nothing but a short text file.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
Where is the linux page cache when you need it

GekkePrutser 4y ago

I'm surprised this actually still works. As far as I remember those floppies were super unreliable. 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.

AddingValue 4y ago

Well guess not anymore, because the article is down?

UberFly 4y ago

I'm guessing the floppies are melting right about now.

h2odragon 4y ago

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.

Nextgrid 4y ago

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.

reustle 4y ago
If we hit a lot of random sub folder URLs (that should all 404), would that trigger the webserver to check the drive to see if the file exists and skip the cache?
- jewel 4y ago
  No. The cache is at the block layer, not the file/directory layer. So the filesystem will look up the directory structure, which will be cached.
  - asveikau 4y ago
    On top of the block layer cache there's also the namei cache for filename to inode lookups, I'm not sure if that covers a file not found case or just a success path, but it may apply here too.
    - bch 4y ago
      Still backed by block layer cache for (hopefully) quick response regardless of outcome
      - danachow 4y ago
        What block layer cache?
        bch 4y ago

MikeAshley178 4y ago

Wonder how long until I can ruin it with Python and Requests. P.S I am not going to and I am drunk.

game-of-throws 4y ago

You're playing with fire using RAID0. If I had data on 30 floppy drives, I'd want at least 20 of them to be parity drives.

muhammadusman 4y ago
that's the point, RAID0 is for speed only
- Maursault 4y ago
  > RAID0 is for speed only In this case, the theoretical maximum bandwidth is 24MBit/s. The problem is the old, slow usb bottleneck. I'm not sure how much faster, probably hundreds of bps rather than under 24, but a faster RAID0 rig would be to instead have 30x Mac G4 Digital Audios connected via gigabit switch, and share then RAID0 the internal floppies. It would also have whatever advantage running an XGrid PPC cluster on Tiger might provide. These boxes also ran PPC Ubuntu; no doubt Linux would eek out a dozen or so more bps, plus beowulf.
  - VLM 4y ago
    I don't know about that BW claim. Back when mp3 was new and computers usually had floppy drives I did the obvious and mp3 bitrates above 64K or so tended to stutter and significantly below 64K did not stutter. Something like voice encoded at 32K sounded at least as good as a phone and played back off a 1.44 floppy and IIRC that was about the best that could be done. You will probably be surprised how long an audio recording can be, if its voice at a low rate on one floppy. If you go variable bit rate and silence detection I subjectively remember "ten minutes" was quite reasonable on a 1.44 disk. Extrapolating from historical experience, thirty or so in parallel should push over half a meg/sec quite reliably. If you record speech onto a floppy drive off a cheap mic you'll record the sound of the floppy in the recording, which is funny to me. I wish I still had those files. Useless, of course, but would be funny.
    - kalleboo 4y ago

ryanmarr 4y ago

I've got a Power Mac G5 sitting right beside me if someone else wants to buy it and get into this G5 floppy website business.

drewzero1 4y ago
Me too. We could start a webring! I just need about 27 more USB floppy drives.
- millzlane 4y ago
  But where will you put are the Warez?
anaganisk 4y ago
Yo, are you serious about that? This feels so interesting.
lostlogin 4y ago
That’s more the Zip drive era isn’t it?
- enduser 4y ago
  Yup

hk1337 4y ago

That has to be one noisy room.

iasay 4y ago
Probably quieter than the DL360 I bought a few months ago and put on eBay after two hours :)
- kstrauser 4y ago
  Oh, is that the one with like 10 1" fans spinning at 8,000 RPM, so that it sounds like a Harrier jet coming in for a landing?
  - iasay 4y ago
    That’s a very accurate description!
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    > 8,000 RPM Usually it's way, way more: https://store.supermicro.com/server-accessories/fans.html?fan_size=616 https://store.supermicro.com/server-accessories/fans.html?fa...
    - kstrauser 4y ago
      Who wouldn’t want that in their living room? Oof.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  Oh god, flashbacks to an early 2000s machine room absolutely full of the bastards. Thankfully, all entrance doors had an earplug dispenser...
- aldrich 4y ago
  Haha, the good old DL360. That fan noise was loud. Let alone the spinning, whining 15k SCSI disks..

throwaway742 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220715175852if_/http://totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net/megafloppy.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20220715175852if_/http://totally...

fny 4y ago
Also https://archive.ph/OzYfT https://archive.ph/OzYfT

layer8 4y ago

Let’s coordinate our web accesses so that it sounds like Floppotron playing the Imperial March.

mikedelago 4y ago

There's an accompanying video as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hc52_PWeU8

rovr138 4y ago
I want to see this hosted from them

iasay 4y ago

I can hear that dying from here. Anyone want to try RAID0 on QIC tapes?

iforgotpassword 4y ago
The main jpeg seems dead already, not Rendering on Firefox mobile.
h2odragon 4y ago
gonna take some kernel hacking to stretch timeouts or a restricted access pattern to avoid seeking, I think.

tolstoshev 4y ago

The song's not bad!

mmh0000 4y ago

I've corrected the title: "I was hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives — now my house is on fire"

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
Yes, exactly. I am trying to get to the store for a few min already (from France) and I lost hope.

CodeWriter23 4y ago

For my next trick, a website hosted on a RAID0 Array of 60 RAM Disks.

zepearl 4y ago
We need details - what about ECC yes/no + un/buffered + raid tech (mdadm/zfs/hardware X/...)? Nothing is simple :D

anaganisk 4y ago

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.

murukesh_s 4y ago
The blame would be on baremetal server. They would move to AWS with multi region EKS clusters and RDS with cross-region disaster recovery. And a multi-cloud strategy is also in place..
- anaganisk 4y ago
  And edge caching on cloudflare or cloudfront.
  - turdnagel 4y ago
    Well, edge caching would almost certainly be enough with a decently high TTL. You don't need all that other junk :)
fny 4y ago
Imagine indeed. This has been suffocated already it seems. Images can't even finish loading.
- anaganisk 4y ago
  It stayed alive as long it could start going black carbon, much longer than others I think.
- p4bl0 4y ago
  Images do not fully load but here I am 35 minutes after you and the website still responds. That's already better than many.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

DontchaKnowit 4y ago

project is awesome. Also- Tell me you're into Chiodos without telling me you're into Chiodos. Big ol dose of nostalgia listening to your old metalcore tracks.

justbaker 4y ago
That was one of my favorite bands as a kid, looooved All's Well That Ends Well.

ISL 4y ago

This is amazing. Website exceeded the high expectations set by the title.

shortformblog 4y ago

Sean rules and this may be his craziest experiment yet. That’s all.

deelowe 4y ago

Not anymore!

rkagerer 4y ago
<sigh> HackerNews we just can't give you anything nice.

fsiefken 4y ago

i'd be also interested in hosting a website on 1 floppy drive, including OS. https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-floppy/ https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-...

Zachsa999 4y ago

Site seems to be really slow currently.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lizardactivist 4y ago

I can't even imagine what defragmenting that file-system would sound like.

emiliog07 4y ago

tablespoon 4y ago

This looks like it's a page about a related project, and has a video of the RAID in action: https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-raid-with-floppy-drives/ https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-raid-with-floppy-drives/

Pakdef 4y ago

LoL is all I can think of

la64710 4y ago

5.1/4 inch or 3.5 inch ones?

aliqot 4y ago

pause on the audio doesnt work.

dpedu 4y ago

How much power do the floppy drives draw? I can't decide if it would be more or less than 30 period hard drives.

hardwaresofton 4y ago

This is awesome. I already have some suggestions: - Put a bird^H^H ZFS on it - Switch to RAID10 (a stripe of mirrors), and go 2/3 floppys wide so you can have some redundancy in each mirror gropu - Get some Pis (or other SBCs) and hook those up and run Ceph... if this keeps going we'll have a SAN soon enough. - ZIP disks?[0] 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. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

notnmeyer 4y ago

all i want to do is see this site :( > Server uptime: 20 seconds > Server load: 157.41 158.15 155.66 oh

Titan2189 4y ago
Where did you get that information from? I tried loading the site multiple times, but it times out / exhausted my patience
- notnmeyer 4y ago
  OP had posted a link to a stats page

effnorwood 4y ago

pulketo 4y ago

I wish I have a dumb idea someday... And win some money

lostgame 4y ago

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.

IncRnd 4y ago

https://archive.ph/OzYfT https://archive.ph/OzYfT

FesterCluck 4y ago

Totally dig the track, brings back memories.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ychompinator 4y ago

xony 4y ago

geerlingguy 4y ago

Today there's a follow-up video: https://youtu.be/PGWpGMrroi8 https://youtu.be/PGWpGMrroi8

mbfg 4y ago

and..... the most unsurprising thing ever.....