Too Simple?

[Sunin]

(5) 8 gig usb flash drives
(1) 5 port usb 2.0 hub

Why can't this be combo'd with a driver to make this into a virtual raid? First the 8gig flash drive i have is 30mb/s read/write cost like 50bucks. So could this combo not be turned into a cheap raid. That's a 40 gig flash based raid which should have Read/Write speeds in the 150mb/s sustained rates (double that of raptors) and access times should be .1 Now if you wanted to take this further and use say 4 usb 2.0 ports you could effectively reach 400mb/s sustained reads. Now obvious that would be pretty expensive to do 5 x 300 = 1500, but you get the idea.

Is there anything like this out there? I'm continuing to try to figure out how I can get some HD performance... I like the topic about the fusionIO which is nand based. There was IRAM a while back but that proved to be unstable...

any other alternatives?

 

[Toytown]

The drives would die fairly quickly, due to the load on them, however ive also been looking at this as my flash drives get around 25MB in speed, so 4 of them would give 90+MB's and virtually no access time.

Unfortunately it looks like you cant raid them together using software mode on windows xp/vista as it wont allow it, although linux will and so far ive not seen any kinda hardware solution other than using CF cards (ide->CF reader).

If you do find a hardware solution, please post it.

 

[drizzt81]

Why can't this be combo'd with a driver to make this into a virtual raid?

I do not know of any reason why it could not. However the best sustained transfer rate you'd get with them all hooked to a single USB hub would be around 60 MiB/s. Using multiple root hubs would increase this limit.

 

[Sunin]

I thought usb 2.0 had a limit of 400mb/s

 

[Ockie]

I believe somone has done this as a proof of concept, but remember that your little drives will not last long at all.

 

[Sunin]

Not long being a year?

 

[unhappy_mage]

I thought usb 2.0 had a limit of 400mb/s

480 megabits per second, which is 60 megabytes per second. However, that's in isochronous mode, which isn't what storage devices use (cameras and the like use it). Storage is more like 40 MB/s.

You could get compactflash and CF->IDE adapters. That would eliminate the USB middleman.