I have done it with usb floppy drives under openbsd, I am sure it is just as trivial under linux but I had obsd and a bunch of usb floppy drives at my disposal.

    #it has been a few years I don't remember if it works with bare drives or if you need a disklabel on each floppy
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    #the raid will show up now, check dmesg
    disklabel -E sd5
    newfs /dev/sd5a
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy/
    umount /mnt/floppy
    bioctl -d sd5
    #after inserting all floppies reassemble the raid
    bioctl -c 5 -l /dev/sd2c,/dev/sd3c,/dev/sd4c softraid0
    mount /dev/sd5a /mnt/floppy
    

One day in what was probably sullen resentment that openbsd has no equivalent to DRBD I assembled a raid on iscsi drives, that is, initiate 5 iscsi sessions to independent hosts then assemble a raid with them. and you can imagine my surprise when it very nearly worked, I could read and write just fine. The part that did not work was drive failure. My guess is that iscsid did not fail a drive in a way that softraid understood. so a drive failure just lead to everything hanging.

> I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

Yeah:)

> Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

- Doug Gwyn

> I love it when a system like this A. does not try to railroad you into the "correct path" and B. the independent layers actually work independently.

Agree! My first thought while reading the article was that it would be very easy to do this on OpenBSD as well, either with USB floppies or normal 34-pin drives as well.

OpenBSD's softraid stack doesn't care much about what the underlying hardware is as long as it looks like a disk and talks like a disk.