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Flash drives in raid

LinusLoveMe
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So I have 4 Sandisk 32 gb usb thumb drives. Was wondering if it may be worth it to get a little usb hub and throw them in raid array to toss a few games on it. Currently I have I'm running everything on an older hdd so load times are relatively slow, however I can not afford to upgrade to an ssd at this time. So are usb raid arrays even somewhat reliable? I've seen benchmarks from what others have done and they got some pretty fast speeds out of it so it seemed compelling.

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I don't see it as being something that you should or even could keep as a permanent solution, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to try? I know it has been and can be done. 

 

Go for it. :D

Laptop - Lenovo Y50   Keyboard - Corsair K95 RGB Cherry MX Brown   Mouse - Logitech G502 Proteus Core   Mousepad - Razer Firefly


 


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It could work, it for sure would increase the speed for 1-2 drives in raid, though if using usb 2.0 then 3 or 4 may have little/no impact on performance.

Specs: CPU - Intel i7 8700K @ 5GHz | GPU - Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming | Motherboard - ASUS Strix Z370-G WIFI AC | RAM - XPG Gammix DDR4-3000MHz 32GB (2x16GB) | Main Drive - Samsung 850 Evo 500GB M.2 | Other Drives - 7TB/3 Drives | CPU Cooler - Corsair H100i Pro | Case - Fractal Design Define C Mini TG | Power Supply - EVGA G3 850W

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it is possible to do. I did it a short time ago as a little experiment. The issue I had was that the USB hub was the bottleneck of it (I was using a USB2 hub). One of the drives died after a couple of days so I gave up before I killed any more of them...

Leviathan - CaseLabs Mercury S8 Build Log 

Betsy - NCase M1 Media/ LAN Build Log

Bertha - 12TB  NAS Build Log

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So I have 4 Sandisk 32 gb usb thumb drives. Was wondering if it may be worth it to get a little usb hub and throw them in raid array to toss a few games on it. Currently I have I'm running everything on an older hdd so load times are relatively slow, however I can not afford to upgrade to an ssd at this time. So are usb raid arrays even somewhat reliable? I've seen benchmarks from what others have done and they got some pretty fast speeds out of it so it seemed compelling.

If they're just plain USB 2.0 drives then honestly four of them in RAID 0 will still be slower then a 7200RPM hard drive, not to mention MUCH less reliable. 

"Rawr XD"

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it is possible to do. I did it a short time ago as a little experiment. The issue I had was that the USB hub was the bottleneck of it (I was using a USB2 hub). One of the drives died after a couple of days so I gave up before I killed any more of them...

Any assumption as to why the drives died? Possibly heat or was it just the constant writing to them?

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Any assumption as to why the drives died? Possibly heat or was it just the constant writing to them?

No idea why it died. I left it running over night to find that the drive was not working in the morning. 

None of the drives got hot, I just guess they aren't cut out for that sort of workload...

Leviathan - CaseLabs Mercury S8 Build Log 

Betsy - NCase M1 Media/ LAN Build Log

Bertha - 12TB  NAS Build Log

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No idea why it died. I left it running over night to find that the drive was not working in the morning. 

Yeah, flash drives aren't meant to be used constantly :P

"Rawr XD"

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Would be better if the drives and the hub were USB3.0 

Can Anybody Link A Virtual Machine while I go download some RAM?

 

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