In this case, the theoretical maximum bandwidth is 24MBit/s.
The problem is the old, slow usb bottleneck. I'm not sure how much faster, probably hundreds of bps rather than under 24, but a faster RAID0 rig would be to instead have 30x Mac G4 Digital Audios connected via gigabit switch, and share then RAID0 the internal floppies. It would also have whatever advantage running an XGrid PPC cluster on Tiger might provide. These boxes also ran PPC Ubuntu; no doubt Linux would eek out a dozen or so more bps, plus beowulf.
I don't know about that BW claim. Back when mp3 was new and computers usually had floppy drives I did the obvious and mp3 bitrates above 64K or so tended to stutter and significantly below 64K did not stutter.
Something like voice encoded at 32K sounded at least as good as a phone and played back off a 1.44 floppy and IIRC that was about the best that could be done.
You will probably be surprised how long an audio recording can be, if its voice at a low rate on one floppy. If you go variable bit rate and silence detection I subjectively remember "ten minutes" was quite reasonable on a 1.44 disk.
Extrapolating from historical experience, thirty or so in parallel should push over half a meg/sec quite reliably.
If you record speech onto a floppy drive off a cheap mic you'll record the sound of the floppy in the recording, which is funny to me.
I wish I still had those files. Useless, of course, but would be funny.
In this case, the theoretical maximum bandwidth is 24MBit/s.
The problem is the old, slow usb bottleneck. I'm not sure how much faster, probably hundreds of bps rather than under 24, but a faster RAID0 rig would be to instead have 30x Mac G4 Digital Audios connected via gigabit switch, and share then RAID0 the internal floppies. It would also have whatever advantage running an XGrid PPC cluster on Tiger might provide. These boxes also ran PPC Ubuntu; no doubt Linux would eek out a dozen or so more bps, plus beowulf.