the psychotic neurotic

I’d love to have SSDs in my computers to run the OSes from. Unfortunately I don’t have a spare $1000; and even if I did, I don’t think I could afford the divorce proceedings that would likely ensue.

AnalogBit.com has an interesting experiment using 6x 2Gb USB flash drives (a.k.a. USB keys, thumb drives, etc) in a RAID0 (striped) array for the root filesystem on a Linux server.

Partly inspired by AnalogBit and this video of 24 SSDs in a single RAID (thanks Hack-a-Day for enlightening me) I’m going to try doing something similar using 8x 4Gb FAST USB flash drives and 2x 4-port USB hubs. I’m going to configure the drives as a RAID5 (striped with parity) array and using one of the drives as a hot spare. This will create a 24Gb raid array with double redundancy: the RAID5 will continue running with the loss of a single drive and with the hot spare the array will continue working even after the loss of a second drive.

Thanks to NewEgg (as always) for their competitive prices and great customer service I will soon have in my possession, the following:
8x Patriot Xporter XT 4GB Flash Drive (the fastest drives I could find at a reasonable price)
2x LINKSKEY LKA-U2H04 4-port Mini USB 2.0 Hub (cheap, compact and good reviews)

Total cost $108

Come back soon to see how things work.

I’m still here! I got my PC problems resolved and almost have my worspace cleared enough to get back to my Wapaq project.

I’ve decided that my final Wapaq will be sandwiched between sheets of plexiglass. I’ll be using sheet styrene for any insulation layers I’ll need. I ordered some plexiglass and styrene from eStreetPlastics and this should be here soon.

I’m thinking about adding a USB hub into the final build and possibly build in some faqns to keep everything cool.

More updates will be coming very soon.