I am trying to contemplate how stupid an idea this would be...
I was inspired by some foolish fellow, who soon after the release of Mac OS X 10.0 took 5 USB floppy drives, plugged them into his iMac, and set up a RAID5 array on them.
Floppy RAID array.
But then I got thinking. In the office I am sitting next to a stack of 1 GB USB drives that are being given away to customers.
If I snagged say 5 or 10 of them, plugged 4 into a USB hub, duct taped them in place (You knew duct tape would come into this, once I started talking about floppy RAID arrays, right?), and set them up as a RAID5 array, how ridiculous would that be?
Ought to work, and be workable.
Now if I could find a stack of say 4GB keys and do that, a 12GB RAID5 array might be cool.
I am thinking that performance might not be too bad.
But then again, I could do a RAID 10 array for redundancy and performance I suppose.
Edit: As a side note, I think I would still stick with all the USB memory sticks on one hub, because then I can use duct tape to hold it all together.
I feel that the real value of duct tape, outweighs the perceived value of performance.
It's like lipstick on a cat. It seems like a good idea at the time, but eventually you realize that duct tape would have been a better choice.