A great big pile of data

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We've just had occasion to use a floppy disk in the studio for the first time in about 6 years (Andrew couldn't be bothered to go downstairs and get his USB drive stick) and it made us think:

One floppy disk is 3mm thick = 1.44MB
The project folder for the Voice of Cod track 'Heart of Gold' contains 5.5 GB = 5130 MB

Therefore it would take 3563 floppy disks to store the track; the stack would be 10689mm high, or 10.7 metres!!

Blimey.

:Grin: (from Andrew)







As you were...
 
Wow!

Or if you only have the one floppy you could always try converting the wavs to mp3...

at a bit rate of say - 3.

:P
 
You could stack them end to end in a really wobbly tower, it might need a bit of propping up 'cos it'd be 316.7507m tall. :lol:
 
what was on the stiffie or floppy Colin?
some unidentified sample of Ott^s cat?
 
Hehe. And you can be sure that one of them would fail (like always happens with my old Akai sample disks) so make sure you back them up.

You'll need an extra room for the backups!
 
Anyone want to work out how fast you'd need to swap floppy disks to get playback of 24 tracks of 24-bit audio at 44.1KHz? I'd love to but I'm washing my hair right now... :ph34r:
 
you'd need to be pretty fast with those floppies. around 21kHz fast if my geeknes doesn't betray me :blink:
 
Can we assume your 24 tracks are all mono? Good...

If the data transfer rate had been sufficient, you'd need to insert a new floppy every 0.476 seconds. No floppy disk drive exists that allows you to change this fast.

Also, since the data trasfer rate from a 3.5" floppy is only 500kbps, you'd need to configure them in some sort of RAID-0 array, made up of a total of 50 to 51 drives. Assuming you could overcome the technical challenges of implementing such an array (beyond the scope of this estimate), this would at least mean that each floppy would only need changing every 23.8 seconds, but would need to be done simultaneously by a number of floppy disk drive operators. This is achievable with current floppy drive mechanisms.

Things become more complex when you factor in the time taken to remove and insert floppy disks. Average time that this takes is 3 seconds, from disengagement of drive heads, to re-engagement on the next disk. (This figure resulted from repeated timed tests throughout the night.) This introduces breaks in the flow of data, along with a 13% reduction in sustained transfer rate. This would need to be offset by use of a 10MB buffer cache on your custom-made RAID-0 controller, and the addition of a further 6 drives into the array.

Defintely do-able then.
:smoke:
 
Some arrangement like the old 'gramaphone' record players is called for I think.

Those of you old enough to remember: you could stack a pile of singles (albums if you were feeling daring) and it'd work through 'em one at a time.

My Dad's old HMV player was great for this. Played 78s too.
 
Warwick Bassmonkey said:
Can we assume your 24 tracks are all mono? Good...

If the data transfer rate had been sufficient, you'd need to insert a new floppy every 0.476 seconds. No floppy disk drive exists that allows you to change this fast.

Also, since the data trasfer rate from a 3.5" floppy is only 500kbps, you'd need to configure them in some sort of RAID-0 array, made up of a total of 50 to 51 drives. Assuming you could overcome the technical challenges of implementing such an array (beyond the scope of this estimate), this would at least mean that each floppy would only need changing every 23.8 seconds, but would need to be done simultaneously by a number of floppy disk drive operators. This is achievable with current floppy drive mechanisms.

Things become more complex when you factor in the time taken to remove and insert floppy disks. Average time that this takes is 3 seconds, from disengagement of drive heads, to re-engagement on the next disk. (This figure resulted from repeated timed tests throughout the night.) This introduces breaks in the flow of data, along with a 13% reduction in sustained transfer rate. This would need to be offset by use of a 10MB buffer cache on your custom-made RAID-0 controller, and the addition of a further 6 drives into the array.

Defintely do-able then.
:smoke:
Click to expand...

:wo^thy:
 
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