The Thumb Drive RAID Experiment

x.gardner · Posted: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:36:33 Post Subject:

Any other suggestions on raiding these 6 TB drives via USB? I could just plug them into a USB Hub but then I don't get the speed of striping or the data redundency.

srsys · Rated PG Joined: 08 Dec 2008 Posts: 1 Location: USA

Another attempt at this was successfully made at the following link
http://linuxgazette.net/151/weiner.html by January Weiner. He also posted some other interesting links there on the subject...

geokohler · Rated PG Joined: 21 Feb 2011 Posts: 2 Location: NE PA

Hi, I was wondering if you are still into this??? I want to make a USB 3.0 RAID array with 8 $13 8GB USB 3.0 thumb drives. That should rock considerably. The price on flash has fallen through the floor since you excellent experiment. Any help would be greatly appreciated... You can hit me up anytime. My user name is also my gmail account.
Thanks in advance,
George

**Jason** · Posted: Mon, 21 Feb 2011 21:39:04 Post Subject:

I'd be interested to know if it is any easier or more reliable... I just have not had the time or opportunity to follow up on this.

Such USB 3.0 drives could be interesting in the face of SSD prices!

geokohler · Rated PG Joined: 21 Feb 2011 Posts: 2 Location: NE PA

I have several reasons for this. One is to dedicate all 8 to ready boost and see what happens. The $13 8GB USB 3.0 drives read 67MB/Sec each and write 27MB/Sec. That's actual real world, not theoretical so 8 should yield in the nieghborhood of 536MB/Sec read 216MB/Sec write speed with a high quality USB 3.0 hub or 2. The read would nearly flood the 5Gbs capacity of the USB 3.0s 5.0Gbs bandwidth at 4288Mbs on reads leaving some room for overhead. I have an i7-930 with 12GB of OCZ DDR3 1600 and I do quite a bit of video conversion. My only bottleneck is the storage. I had 2 OCZ Vertex 120GB SSDs but they were the old Barefoot controllers so I sold them. They would read 420MB/Sec in RAID 0 and write around 250. I eventually want to replace them with 4 120GB Vertex 2 drives with the new Sandforce controllers set up on 2 SATA 3.0 Dual port PCIe controllers. Each pair in RAID 0 for pretty decent R/W speeds. That should surely drop my time wasted transcoding datastreams. Right now I'm running 4 1.5TB Barracudas in 2 RAID 0 arrays but it is still the bottleneck.
I would love to do some benchmarking tests and boot time tests with a wad of USB 3.0 thumbdrives fully dedicated to readyboost and find out if it actually improves anything. At $13 bucks for each 8GB Crucial USB thumbdrive it's cheap enough to experiment. I've been looking for some type of Windows USB RAID software for USB devices with no luck so far. If anyone knows of anything let me know. The idea of USB RAID thumbdrives would also soup up my 1.2Ghz Thin Clients I use for my MagicJack computers at low cost. Right now I just throw 120GB 1.8" Toshiba drives in them. They work but they are painfully slow if you try to surf the web with them or do anything other then use them for MajicJack. They work perfect for that purpose but it would be nice to do more with them. That would allow me to do more then check my email on the thin clients avoiding having to fire up my big beast. That thing spins the power meter.
Anyone with any experience with Windows based USB RAID apps please hit me up. Any help would be greatly appreciated...
Thanks