The DIY Thumb Drive RAID Array. Missed this one first time out, but it’s still pretty cool. A USB 2.0 RAID array using four standard 512 MB USB flash drives. The results, using a very cheap hub and some naff drives, was a sixfold increase in I/O speeds but at the cost of reliability. Oh and it only seemed to work on Linux. It would be interesting to try this again now with a bunch of higher quality 4 GB drives and a decent hub.
In the end, results were achieved that showed great promise for thumb drive RAID arrays. The transfer rate for a four drive RAID 0 array was quite impressive, offering up to 6x the speed of a single drive while writing, and 2x the speed of a single drive while reading. The whole experiment wound up being rather frustrating though, but greater than 90% of my problems can be traced to these sub-standard thumb drives.
