5
2
The other day I had what I thought was a great idea - I could buy up a bunch of cheap USB 2.0 drives and fill up the spaces in my 7-port USB hub for a super-fast RAID device! But in the light of day it isn't looking so good. I think that this would give me faster read times at least, but how would write times fare? Which RAID level would be best suited for this purpose? (I am trying to optimize for speed, any data doesn't need to be particularly safe.)
If this is a "good idea", or at least not completely foolhardy, how would I go about setting this up? I run Ubuntu 12.10 and Windows 8.
4That would be incredibly slow. First, cheap USB 2.0 drives are slow to begin with. Second, every operation would require a large number of individual drive operations that would be fighting for the same USB bus. It's a horrible idea. – David Schwartz – 2012-12-25T23:48:25.613
I've heard of someone doing it with floppy drives back in the day. Linux is probably a better bet here, with the built in softraid option I suspect. – Journeyman Geek – 2012-12-26T02:11:11.267
Yes, that's what I was thinking. too. – WindowsEscapist – 2012-12-26T02:22:57.217
1You could use a USB 3.0 hub/devices. However, keep in mind that the failure rate for flash drives (especially cheap ones) is probably a hell of a lot higher than an actual internal drive, so you probably don't want to use RAID-0. – Bigbio2002 – 2013-01-03T15:27:58.833
I think I'll end up mounting it on
/tmp
to if it fails it won't be that important (or if it is, serves me right for putting important stuff in volatile storage!). Sadly, I don't have USB 3 (that would fix a lot). – WindowsEscapist – 2013-01-03T15:37:11.867