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#floppy

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I also remember backing up onto #floppy disks back in the day, but this has always been rather impractical.

The #IBMPC #XT had a 10MB #HDD and 360kB FDD, so with a 2:1 compression ratio, you'd need 15 disks to back the machine up.

This didn't change much in the early '90s. You had a 1440kB FDD, but you also had a 40MB HDD, so you'd need 14 floppies to back it up.

The introduction of USB HDDs, especially compact bus-powered ones, has *greatly* improved the #backup situation.

🚀✨ Behold, the riveting saga of #booting #BeOS on a #Hitachi FLORA Prius—a task so thrilling it demands a 1999 user manual and a sprinkle of Japanese documentation. Because nothing screams cutting-edge #technology like juggling #floppy #disks and boot managers in the era of #Y2K panic. 🤖💾
testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.o #Prius #HackerNews #ngated

testou.free.frLaunching the BeOS on Hitachi FLORA Prius systemsTechnical Support document for Launching the BeOS on Hitachi FLORA Prius systems.

I wonder if a sufficiently large #RAID 0 array of #floppy drives could match the throughput of an #SSD, and if so, how many drives it would take.

Let's see…

The Crucial T705 does sequential IO at 13387 MB/s, or 109666304 kbps. A floppy drive can do sequential IO at 250 kbps.

So, an array of 438665 floppy drives should be about the same speed, and would store about 602 GB. Not bad.

Now, how do I connect 438665 floppy drives to one computer? 🤔

My horribly old #desktop #PC is finally starting to die. Currently running a backup (using #zfs send/recv) to my server of one important local dataset.

Now I started looking for new hardware and to my surprise found a "modern" mainboard with a "real" parallel port (internal header, certainly good enough). This really helps with my retro hobby (#C64), years ago I soldered a simple interface cable that allows using a 1541 floppy on the PC, I even ported the #opencbm driver for that from #Linux to #FreeBSD. Without a parallel port, you'd need some complex USB interface instead including a microcontroller and "tons of shit", while the cable for the parallel port basically consists of a few diodes.

Now I wonder one thing: I'd also love to have a #FDC (#floppy drive controller) again. Is there any modern board coming with THAT as well or should I just forget about it?