I think it would be really cool if I could raid bluray or dvd drives together but didn’t really find much information while searching the web.
I love physical media but it’s slow. I’m poor, at least I live poor, but have lots of old bluray and dvd drives just collecting dust. Not to mention a stock pile of unused writable disks!
I’ve been looking and see a few others ask this question on linus tech tips and reddit but nobody has actually tried to do it or maybe even looked into doing it really, at least publicly talked about it, maybe they have, if so could you provide links .
Anyways is this possible? I’d love to see a video on this Wendell and think it could get a bunch of views.
Even if you could create a RAID array using bluray drives it would only work for disks that you burnt using the array, it wouldn’t make reading other disks any faster.
If this is about ripping performance then you need to find a drive which isn’t speed limited as most of them are.
I’ve got a kenwood 72x ucr-421 that has optics to split the beam to effectively read multiple tracks at once, like a raid0.
not sure why it didn’t take off in the media after CD though.
As for raid0’ing separate bluray drives together, it should theoretically be possible because they are block devices (might run into some issues with how the firmware would handle timeouts)
I know people have raid0’d floppy drives together.
@Dexter_Kane Good points! I’m curious if I had multiple drives that weren’t all the same speed would it slow down the entire raid? Also I wonder if there would be a drive limit . Not saying I could ever afford more than four probably but what if I wanted to backup a 500gb volume with five bluray drives.
You would be limited by the slowest drive, I don’t see why there would be a limit to the number of drives but it would be an incredibly janky way to do a backup, I sure wouldn’t want to rely on that if I needed to restore data from it.
Maybe raid 5? lol I can picture it now, 50 - 5.25 bluray drives with some pcie cards. You could stack a bunch of disk drives from floor to ceiling. Idk I bet someone might have 1000’s of drives. It would be a cool experiment.
You will theoretically get weird latency issues because of different ramp up times between each drives and maybe slightly different conditions like slight temperature and airflow variations in the PC/server case. A hard drive is sealed and that these variables could easily be overcome, unlike the freely rotating disk in the air. Also, I do not know if Blueray drives have some sort of cache in them that could be utilized for better synchronization of read/writes.
You could probably do this if the Blueray Drive you bought were from the same batch with the same internals down to the components. in similar enough environments.
In the end. Disk burned into ISOs put into hard disk drives in raid0 could be a more reliable and reproducible way to do it.
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. Not saying I could ever afford more than four probably but what if I wanted to backup a 500gb volume with five bluray drives.