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.