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Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by eby on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @11:49PM (#38552953)
Finally, a use for that drawer full of 1 GB USB drives!
Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by o11c on Thursday December 07, 2023 @12:20AM (#38553127)
Beware that bad sectors probably exist on those, and modern filesystems (which falsely assume the hardware will do automagical remapping) make it hard to run `badblocks`.

From the fsck man pages, only ext2, ext3, ext4, and reiserfs support it. I hope that `btrfs-convert` deals with it correctly, but you must not ever run `btrfs balance` or delete the backup (it won't waste space if it was a fresh FS). And if further bad blocks develop you'll have to redo this all from scratch.

Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by M95D on Thursday December 07, 2023 @09:02AM (#38556406)
btrfs doesn't support bad blocks. It's written in the documentation.

From experience I can tell you that most usb sticks fail while reading back data by returning bad data, not an error or timeout, and the defective sectors aren't always the same (internal remap to wear leveling might be the cause of that).

Advice: Do md-raid0 on half of them, md-raid0 on the other half, and btrfs raid1 on the two md devices. If you want to exceed 25MB/s, use different USB controllers, not different ports on the same hub.

Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by o11c on Thursday December 07, 2023 @11:57AM (#38558742)
Btrfs doesn't directly support bad blocks. But since the conversion is supposed to use only "free space" that's presumably excluding bad blocks (which are presumably counted as allocated).
Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by M95D on Thursday December 14, 2023 @07:11AM (#38640517)
Doesn't support bad blocks at all.

Bad blocks don't count as allocated unless they are newly discovered - data should be moved asap if it's still recoverable. An allocated block with nothing in it is an error.

Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by __lm__ on Thursday December 07, 2023 @01:44AM (#38553574)
When Sun Microsystems was still existing they made a (quite funny) video putting 12 usb sticks in a ZFS pool with RAID: https://constantin.glez.de/2011/01/24/how-save-world-zfs-and...
Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by somat on Thursday December 07, 2023 @02:27AM (#38553813)
I wanted to boot my home truenas box off usb flash, but I also know how flakey usb flash can be, so I use a pair of drives in a zfs mirror.

I would not recommend this setup, Any real drive would be better. I just hated wasting drive bays for the non-critical boot/system partition. In my defense despite burning through many cheap usb drives I have not lost the boot yet, however I do keep a new spare drive taped to the unit.

Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by hdjdkdbdbe on Thursday December 07, 2023 @03:15AM (#38554089)
I have the same setup for my router ... Openbsd 16-32gb if one dies I create a new one and set it up with ansible....
Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by cylinder714 on Thursday December 07, 2023 @10:26AM (#38557381)
From 2009, what I think was a famous video on which some kids in the UK put together a 6-gigabyte RAID with 24 256-gigabyte Samsung drives: https://youtu.be/26enkCzkJHQ
Re:Five-Disk Floppy Raid: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage (2009) by phil21 on Thursday December 07, 2023 @01:24PM (#38559870)
I had grand plans to make a giant USB ZFS volume from tradeshow thumb drives in bulk.

It lasted a couple evenings while I bumped into apparently every Linux USB driver/chipset issue possible trying to drive a couple hundred drives via cheapo AliExpress USB hubs.

It was fun times, but even more useless than I originally thought it would be. It was amusing to get >1GBps for a minute or two across 256 crappy thumb drives though!