USB Thumbdrive RAID eXperimenT

[MadModMike]

http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews05/article.php?item=thumbraid&file=1

Not sure if this has been brought up here or not, but I was perusing the web instead of doing my Network Security LAB ( :twisted: I'm a rebel ) in class and found this. It's pretty interesting to see, only works on Linux but hey, still good.

~~Mad Mod Mike, pimpin' the world 1 rig at a time

 

[mpjesse]

You know when I initially started reading this article I thought to myself, "what possible reason would anyone have to use RAID in conjunction with flash drives?" But I read on...

He makes a very good point and application for Flash RAID: miniITX. A lot of these kids now-a-days are "tricking" out their rides with on board full fledged PC's and laptops. I've seen numerous cars with the PC's embedded into the dashboard. Now if this car is used for street racing (or otherwise), a hard drive is certainly not the greatest of choices for storage. As we all know hard drives are susceptible to vibrations. And let's face it, these tricked out rides aren't exactly designed to ride like a Lexus LS400! But Flash drives are an excellent choice. With a little modification one can easily get WinXP on a 1GB flash drive. And Linux will fit nicely on something even smaller like 256MB.

Redundancy is also very useful in this application. There's no real good way to back up a flash drive- certainly not if it's embedded into a car dashboard somewhere. So RAID 1 would be put to very good use here. A lot of these kids use these laptops and on board computers in conjuction with the car computer to monitor things like RPM, MPH, temperatures, etc. So I'm sure they wanna keep the system backed up.

Anyways, great article. Thanks for posting MadMod.

-mpjesse

 

[MadModMike]

It'd be great for showing off . Go to a LAN party and bust out 4 Flash Drives in a RAID 0 and it's faster than the guys HDD who you owned haha. Priceless.

~~Mad Mod Mike, pimpin' the world 1 rig at a time

 

[daBliggah]

Reading that article made me remember something about how Windows Vista is supposed to be able to use the the flash memory on a thumb drive to boost performance. It can be used to expand a system's virtual memory space:

THG Article

I would find it humorous if something akin to this experiment came to be in a future incarnation of the Windows OS.

Thanks for the post.

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Hey Mike,

Firstly: Nice find.

LaCie are doing a 8 GB USB flash storage drive that is very small, 10 of them would give 80 GB (in RAID-0, less in RAID-5/6).

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10268

http://www.i-tech.com.au/products/742_LaCie_Carte_Orange_8GB_USB2_0_card_drive.asp

I've got one right here

However the seek time on them is not that good, HDDs actually seek faster than most flash memory storage devices. - Hopefully this will improve in the future though, and some fast Camera storage (smaller, in both size and capcity) might seek very quickly, and have better DTR.

LaCie also make very shock resistant HDD enclosuers, with HUGE amounts of rubber around the HDD... possibly in RAID-1 / RAID-5 configurations.

They are one smart company.

Anyone know of anyone else doing half the stuff they do ?

So obvious, but so uncommon too.

Also check out: http://www.yawarra.com.au/ ; as it is sort of related to the subject of using flash devices for a computer with no moving parts.

 

[michaelahess]

Dam, thought I was special, I have a comp in my van running linux with 2 512 thumbs in raid 1 and a heavily padded hd for storage. I have a wireless card so I can do backups to my home pc's (computer boots in the middle of the night and does it from my driveway)

Never had a prob with the hd or speeds from the thumbs course I don't play games on it! Probably could use the hd by itself, but I had them laying around and wanted to try it It certainly works!

daBliggah:

You're right about vista, it'll try to take a chunk of any removable media ya put in it, flash cards, zip drives, probably anything on a scsi, sata, or ide bus in fact. I plugged my Nikon into it and it wanted to use that! (Haven't noticed even a bit of performace increase though...)

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Check the 'effective seek time' on a flash device, and compare it to a HDD and then to real RAM.

Even the data transfer rate of flash media isn't 'that' fast, esp when compared to actual RAM.

Maybe it is more of a laptop only thing, and will be disabled (by default) when Vista launches on desktop machines. Designed to save power, and decrease HDD failure in laptops.... but not really improve performance.

Changing the write back flush cache timer in the Windows OS makes far more of a difference, esp if you have 4 GB of (real) RAM.

Microsoft will prob market it like it is the best thing since being able to order sliced bread over the Internet.