Mac OS X kan meer dan wij (dan ik, tenminste) denken. Ene Daniel Blade Olson bewijst dat Apple nog wat functies onder de Mac OS X-motorkap heeft verstopt op het gebied van diskette’s en RAID. Na eerst teleur te zijn gesteld door z’n Dell (z’n computer, niet z’n vriendin), die geen USB FDD RAIDs ondersteunt, besloot hij het eens via zijn favoriete besturingssysteem te proberen. En jawel, Mac OS X blijkt USB FDD RAIDs wél te ondersteunen… Het activeren van deze funtie is in 4 stappen mogelijk:

Citaat: 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. 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. 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 shmancy stuff. All I know is that my FDD raid rules! Well, anyway, you drag each volume over to the RAID making thing and then click CREATE. After a very entertaining display of USB FDD flashing lights, whirling drives, and an interesting rhythm of spinning technology sounds, my RAID was complete. At first I thought it was screwed up, but it just took a while for the various units to meld themsleves into a single super duper kalimazooper floppy drive. Upon completion. I had a new SINGLE 4.22 MB floppy disk drive called UNTITLED. Don’t ask me where the other MBs when, I dont know, and I am frankly pretty suprised I got this far at this point. I guess this is the RAID spliting the parity over each drive a bit, so I lose a drive? I cleverly renamed it to “floppy raid” denoting it’s newly deserved status. But something was missing, so I figured it needed it’s own ICON. I made a new one with a cool RAID bug spray logo on it. This is supposed to conotate the punk rock and alternative nature of my wacky USB FDD antics. Use the RAID. (turbo lightningspeed!!)Now I know this is now just a 4.22 MB drive (acutally it is 3.9MB of usable disk space when mounted). I also understand that carrying 5 USB floppy drives around is not exactly portable, but there is something special and amazing about the speed of this floppy cluster. It is really cool when you access the drives the way they flash each light and spin in no particular order that I can discern. It is of course faster than a standard single drive. I was able to transfer “DEVO Uncontrolable Urge.mp3” which is 3.6 MB in 32 seconds. Which is pretty good I think.

Het leukste van deze functie is natuurlijk dat het kopiëren van bestanden (voor een USB floppy-drive) ontzéttend snel gaat (3.6 MB in 36 seconden). Dat is bij mijn Imation SuperDisk Drive wel anders…

USB Diskdrives via RAID