USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X (2004)

Summary

The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20040202110812/http://ohlssonvox.8k.com:80/fdd_raid.htm WHAT: The USB FDD raid was constructed using the following (1) One Bondi Blue iMAC 500 MhZ ( It was upgraded with a SONNET Harmoni G3 ) running OS X 10.2.4 (2) Five standard Y-E DATA 1X USB Floppy Disk Drives here they are..... (3) 5 random floppies laying around (4) Generic USB 4 port hub WHY: Why not? I had just set up my 2 firewire drives and thought, "Can I RAID USB Floppy DRIVES"? I happen to work for Y-E DATA which is one of the worlds largest manufacturers of USB Floppy Drives, so I have access to these things. I had just been going through a pile of returns testing the drives for failure. There are always a few that are fine though, so I got 5 of them for this very important scientific feat. HOW When I first tried to do this I looked at my DELL running Windows XP, but unfortuately it does not allow USB FDD RAIDs. HOW LAME!!!! So, I turned to my new favorite OS, Apple OS X. Here is how I did this low-hi tech marvel. (1) Connected the 5 USB Drives ( about 1 minute) 4 of the drives connected to the generic powered USB hub ( must be powered ) this hub is connected to the extra keyboard USB port on my iMac. The 5th drive connected to the iMac's second USB port. (2) Prepare the Media ( about 10 minutes ) I don't really even know if I really needed to format the disks, but I thought it would not hurt to start fresh and clean. I formated each floppy diskette using a Mac OS tool called Disk Tool giving each diskette a MS DOS format type and labled each one 1 through 5 for cleanliness. (2) Build the RAID ( about 6 minutes ) The RAID is built using disk utility. Mac OS X has two built in choices in their software based RAID. MIRROR and STRIPE. I thought I was going for speed more than security here, so I went with the STRIPE. If you want to know if it is RAID 0 or RAID 4 or RAID 5, you are asking the wrong guy, I build floppy disk drive RAIDs none of that fancy shma...