USB Key Raid ?

[demonic]

I have tried searching on google but havent found much info.

But is there a way of getting a USB 2.0 hub with say 5 ports and putting a 2gb or any capacity USB key in each of the ports and making a Spanning Set RAID Hard Drive?

If it could be done, I'd love to purchase 5x 8GB USB Keys and make a 40GB Solid State Drive.

Any info anyone could give, much appricated.

Changed my google search and came up with this: http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews05/article.php?item=thumbraid&file=1

Of course, if anyone has articles which show more success, would be nice to see.

 

[Hector]

They article shows success in the configuratino. The problem was hardware related. If the thumb drives are of higher quality than those of the article everything should be fine, but forget using a usb raid configuration under windows.

 

[demonic]

Are you sure the problem was strictly down to hardware?

I would hate to get a belkin 7 port usb hub and populate it all with drives and it not work.

I have forgotten about windows and no problem getting it to work under linux and using as a NAS.

 

[Skrying]

Would Vista have any use for this with ReadyBoost? Something tells me no, but it would be interesting. Wouldn't loading a lot of your programs from such a flash system be faster than loading from your hard drive?

 

[Hector]

I haven't tried vistas readyboost, so i don't know to what extent it would improve loading times. As far as I know flash devices have the advantage of inexistent seek times, but transfer rates are a little low.

I'm using a software raid under linux whith two 250GB discs, and i haven't found a single problem in five months.

 

[demonic]

I am suprised that no-one else has come up with something like this, but on a much larger scale :

http://tomshardware.co.uk/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/index.html

Im currently investigating all the alternatives as I want to create a nice solid state drive, maximum I'll ever need is about 40gb.

 

[Hector]

Suposedly, new hard drives will be hybrid. They'll have flash memory in order to speed up boot process by reading boot files from this flash memory. I think i read samsung will comercialize this kind of hdds the next year.

 

[Frank]

I think your best bet is a Linux server over a fast network link. Even more so: a lot (if not most) expensive RAID controllers for servers nowadays use a fast microcontroller that runs an embedded Linux software RAID.

 

[Skrying]

Suposedly, new hard drives will be hybrid. They'll have flash memory in order to speed up boot process by reading boot files from this flash memory. I think i read samsung will comercialize this kind of hdds the next year.

Microsoft support these drives in Vista and Intel is working on Robson (I think that's the name) in which they place flash memory on the motherboard that would serve a similar purpose. From what I've read it helps performance and also extends battery life in laptops, which is Intel's main goal for mobile computing and this technology.