[PLUG] RAID over usb-storage?

Ed Sawicki ed at alcpress.com
Sun Oct 16 06:23:52 UTC 2005


Russell Senior wrote:
> Has anyone done this?  
> 
> You can get 2GB SanDisk Cruzer Micros (about an inch long) for a
> little over $100 each, plug four of them into a little USB hub and
> make a 6 gig RAID5 array.  Light weight, easily transportable, some
> some redundancy, built in hot-pluggability, etc.  Hardware cost,
> spendy-per-byte, around $450.
> 
> 
I did this about two years ago. I demonstrated it at a BizNix
meeting with 3 or 4 USB flash drives. I did RAID 0, 1, and 5. I
reformatted the drives for ext3. It worked reasonably well but USB 1.0,
at the time, was slow. I never intended it to be practical - I did it
as a way to demonstrate Linux RAID to students. Two of the flash drives
were Lexar Jumpdrives and they failed soon after. I was unable to
determine why they failed - Lexar tech support in India were no
help - in their world computers only run Windows.

Flash drives generally have limited "durability" - about 10 million
write operations. You wouldn't want to use them in applications that
are write intensive.

Ed



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