USB Thumbdrive RAID eXperimenT

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

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.

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...)