Toaster RAID Returns, Better Than Ever
Table of contents
- 1. A Little Bit Of Background
- 2. Things Have Changed
- 3. Hard Drives And Linux Distros
- 4. Design Objectives
The idea for RAID 5 in a toaster came up when I was working at ApplianceWare in Fremont, Calif., back in 2001, when terms like "information appliance" were all the rage. Since then, the company’s main product has continued to be a slimmed-down Linux distribution that lets you turn a computer into a file server.
I had an old retro-toaster at the time and we were doing compatibility tests with various system boards. For fun, I stuffed a small system board into an old toaster. This gave the marketing teams something more interesting than a 1U whitebox to use at trade shows and sales presentations. It also made for some good laughs when visiting customers.
The first toaster RAID used a 5.25" AMI motherboard with two on-board SCSI adapters. The system had three 3.5" SCSI drives, each of which sported an impressive 8 GB capacity. The whole system, including the 250 W power supply, fit into an old 1970s vintage General Electric four-slice toaster.
The SCSI drives made one heck of a racket. The CPU was a Pentium MMX and there was a whopping 128 MB of memory on board. ApplianceWare and AMI custom-designed the motherboard.
Toaster RAID #1 was a bit heavy and bulky and admittedly not my finest piece of artwork. So Toaster RAID #2, which was half the size, was built soon after Toaster RAID #1 during the summer of 2001. The motherboard was another non-standard form factor, measuring about 6" by 8". The CPU clock speed was 200 MHz and there were 32 MB of memory in the SODIMM (laptop-style) form factor. Storage consisted of a pair of mirrored 8 GB 5,400 RPM parallel IDE drives.
From left to right, Toaster RAIDs #2, #3, and #4.
- #2–September 2001, 8 GB mirrored, 200 MHz processor, 100 Mb Ethernet
- #3–December 2005, 20 GB mirrored, same 200 MHz processor, 100 Mb Ethernet
- #4–January 2009, 1,280 GB RAID 5, 2.4 GHz dual-core processor, 1 Gb Ethernet.
Toaster RAID #3 was built in late 2005 with the same system board as Toaster RAID #2, but with a pair of mirrored 20 GB 3.5" parallel IDE hard drives. At that time two drives were all that would fit in a small toaster and that was with an external laptop style power supply (see photo).
- From left to right this picture shows an exposed view the same three Toaster RAID systems; #2 (Sept. 2001), #3 (Dec. 2005), and #4 (Jan. 2009).
- Build Your Own,
- toaster ,
- raid ,
- hdd
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I thought the idea in fitting a NAS into a toaster is that you plugged the disks through the bread slots!
"Is that Patrick Swayze!?" -Moses as he looked across the Red Sea.
I thought the idea in fitting a NAS into a toaster is that you plugged the disks through the bread slots!
yeah it would ve been nice if you could just shove in two hot plug & play drives in there.
gives a whole new meaning to "hot swappable"
yeah it would ve been nice if you could just shove in two hot plug & play drives in there.
Imagine a backup-product like the various 'one-touch' backup offerings -- but in this case, you just push a drive into the toaster slot -- it begins the backup process, when done, it can eject** the drive. That sounds very sweet.
**-raise drive, not physically throw it out of the toaster! :-)
Then why not use some of the 640/750GB or 1.5/2TB drives?
Any ways cool mod.
ghetto-fab
Here's a better one:
http://www.embeddedarm.com/softwar [...] oaster.php
Grate job, looks perfect mate.
wouldve been cooler to put in a dvd drive in the bread slots.
How's this hold up in a heavy sea? Data corrupt, read errors as you pound to weather could be a problem. Also where's the view of the light show, I wanted to see those led's flashing and shining thru the bread slots. A hollow-graphic hula girl shining a-top the slots would be a motivational feature. Ideas for toaster RAID 2012
Maybe you could connect it wirelessly to your network and "hide" it in your kitchen.
Maybe you could connect it wirelessly to your network and "hide" it in your kitchen.
hmmm and then your girlfriend get's a craving for some toasted bread ...
all kinds of crumbs and sh** inside your raid
Seems like a perfect place to hide all the p0rn, innocent looking toaster.
Maybe you could connect it wirelessly to your network and "hide" it in your kitchen.
Sounds like an amazing way to hide something.
Possibly make it so 1 of the slots work, and insulate the computer from the heat? Forcing a shutdown if the toaster is actually used. All wireless of course.
hmmm and then your girlfriend get's a craving for some toasted bread ...all kinds of crumbs and sh** inside your raid
Ha. My brother used to put waffles in our VCR, and yet it still lived. A protected compuer would be fine.