I played with RAID/NAS in 2005, (this was before SSD) so much so that I had a very very fast system made out of old rubbish. Well, sort of. A friend at Silicon Graphics (who made honking great graphic supercomputers back in the day) sent me a case of the 3rd fastest drive available (at the time 80MB SCSI, (160 and 320 were out, not it's 640 which is what USB-C is because it's SCSI. Finally - SAS - Serial Attached SCSI) and I had other fun bits. I visited a friend, who happened to have something to do with the AltaVista Vax cluster. When I got there he had all this computer crap on his dining table. He hands me a huge card and says "here, you'll like this". "What the hell is it?" "A three channel SCSI RAID controller". I'd heard of RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive drives) but never played with it. It's hard enough getting disk drives to work in that era. Sounded lofty.

For about a month I went on a buying Frenzy on ebay and bought more RAID controllers - a $1700 board when new, now $10 because everyone needed the faster ones. Bonus. I ended up getting 3 or 4. One didn't work at all and the weird IBM (ServRaidIII) was 160Mbit, not 80 like the others were. I also bought boxes of chea drives, little IBM DDRS things that perform way better than they should. Fast little things, as were the SGI ones, but OMG they run hot. You can't even plug one into a normal PC without adding two fans.

The first thing I noticed was "I'm gonna need a bigger power supply" and found out the heavy ones are expensive. I found a $300 one that did 700 watts. Thats half a hair dryer and fie times what early PC's had for a power supply.

I installed it and the first thing I hooked up was a floppy drive, cause, that's how you set up the raid stuff. No USB boot back then.

The nice thing about hard drives is you can not put any cable o backwards. But you can with a floppy. And I did.

Whoops.

As soon as I turned on the power supply I smelled smoke and thought I'd been ripped off. I stuff it off and found the floppy drive had an "issue" . What was left of it anyway. Only the metal remained, the circuit board had been vaporised in less than a second. Truly impressive. And the power supply still worked Good power supply.

I hooked everything up properly and it worked. Now, that's better than it sounds because these drives can be picky. Due to static or mishandling they failed at about 1 per two weeks, but I had lots.

So, what I'd done what install 3 x three channel controllers and had nine drives hooked up so each drive had it's own SCSI bus. With no contention they could run at full speed. And should be fast.

I didn't have this system long, it was so hot and so fragile it was not practical to use. But OMFG it was unbelievably fast,

I made one controller "sys" the ok, another one was "data" while the last one dual SCSI-160 was "swap". In windows, C: D: and E: IN Unix hda... when you know,

My benchmark was loading Paint Shop Pro. (A Canadian version of Adobe Paintshop, older and better, it's available as free-ware now oldversion fot com, the manuals are online now too, the on that used to be a book is by far the best - learn the scripting!), the old version 9 is brilliant. All later ones suck dead gerbils through a dirty garden hose. 32 bit only, sadly). Anyway, it takes almost 3 minuets to load the first time, then about 2 minutes to lad on successive times. It loaded so fast I could not measure it. I Was able to do a weeks work in an hour. But not for long. Would it boot the next day? Of courser not. I screwed with it for a week, then gave up, half of it was broken and I had work to do, so I bought a T52 thinkpad which was replaced by a T60 dual core 3 years later and I'm still typing on that same machine. Once you've built a 9 drive system you REALLY learn to understand how nice reliability is. I've fixed the Lenovo maybe a dozen times - new fans, screen, power and audio connectors, the damn thing won't die and is only marginally slower than 4 year old laptops and to be honest that can be hacked to be as fast. But, remember what I said about reliability?

Anyway, all I have left is one photo of this hot mess. Below.

The point of all this is the more drives you have in parallel the faster it is. The more controllers or interfaces you use, the faster it gets. Tree is really really good. Now, once you get to these speeds, ,forget windows. It can't use it all. Some versions of Unix can, most Linux sot so much, but the Linux distros with a BSD kernel are good, FreeBSD is good and Apples thing based on a successor to Unix called Plan 9 from Bell Labs, is also good if not better (and I'm no Apple guy, I'm a Unix guy that is forced to use PC's, but my server has been BSD since 1986, and that's where I actually work)

The final great irony here is that it takes 3 days to install windows and get it useful on that system. Remember this was 2005 with 3 - 8 year old equipment. To configure the Mylex and AMI Raid cards, I just boot to the BIOS and you got the BIOS on the raid controlled and started messing with the complicated config. The IBM one comes with a CD, you boot it and within 15 seconds you have a working copy of linux, which then runs a graphical app to very easily set up the ServRaid controlled. 15 seconds to get an os running just so I could then spend 3 days to get Windows to work. Oh irony, I love you.

There are six drives on top and three in the computer. 3 PC fans in the PC and one giant one outside than was spinning, it's just a fast shutter that stopped the motion.

You can, I think, see the big 18G drives from SGI and on Maxtor that was by far the noisiest, the three quiet, cooler, thinner 6G DDRS drives are inside the case.

Those cables are the weak point which is we we don't use the any more. Very very fragile. I started with 7 add in the end has one that worked. Oh and they're expensive.

Probably the most fun I've ever had doing this sort of thing; I wrote disk drive device drivers for a lot of computer companies in the 1980s in Los Angeles. But never anything like this. If you put the maximum number of drives in each cable (fifteen) then you could use this for 135 drives They would fill 3 large (US) frde sized cabinets. Those sort of things were for medical imaging back then, never mind a USB stick can hold more now. But I wanted fast, not big.