USB Raid Arry (really strange theory)

[Emerald_Eagle]

So I have a really stupid question about USB Raid (yes I know striping USB drives together via software hinders performance, this is just a theory).  Seeing as the new Mac Pro (desktop) has 8 TB3 ports at back, a single TB3 will run 8 USB 3.0 at full speed, and a single USB 3.0 will run 10 USB 2.0's at full speed.  Would it be possible to run 8 TB3 to 8x USB 3.0 hubs, and run a 10x USB 2.0 hub from each USB 3.0 port, put a 2TB Kingston USB 3.0 (running at 2.0 speed of course) in each of the 640 available USB 2.0 ports, stripe them all together as RAID 0 in windows, and have a giant 1280TB raid arry of flash drives?

[GrockleTD]

In theory sure. In practice.... yeah I doubt they would be willing to loan out 1.28 PB in flash drives

[Mikensan]

The issue is if the software will let you - for example Storage Spaces will not let you use removable media. FlexRAID may let you - I've never used it but I do not know the limitations of it.

 

FreeBSD / Linux however may give you a little more wiggle room since this will show up as a device which you can feed to MDADM or ZFSraid.

 

Just keep in mind RAID is for availabilty - making data available even in the event of disk failure. If you don't have a need for such uptime then RAID may be more work than it is worth. If you just one target or a giant pool of disks to throw data at you may want another solution than RAID.

[AbydosOne]

7 hours ago, Emerald_Eagle said:

So I have a really stupid question about USB Raid (yes I know striping USB drives together via software hinders performance, this is just a theory).  Seeing as the new Mac Pro (desktop) has 8 TB3 ports at back, a single TB3 will run 8 USB 3.0 at full speed, and a single USB 3.0 will run 10 USB 2.0's at full speed.  Would it be possible to run 8 TB3 to 8x USB 3.0 hubs, and run a 10x USB 2.0 hub from each USB 3.0 port, put a 2TB Kingston USB 3.0 (running at 2.0 speed of course) in each of the 640 available USB 2.0 ports, stripe them all together as RAID 0 in windows, and have a giant 1280TB raid arry of flash drives?

Not to that extent, because you can only address 127 USB devices from one controller (7-bit address). Kinda depends on whether the TB3->USB3 is considered a separate controller.

 

And that's besides the fact Windows basically won't let you combine removable devices together in any useful fashion (I can't even RAID together two normal HDDs in a USB 3.1G2 dock).

 

Also, having a 640-device wide stripe would be useless, because at most reasonable stripe sizes, a given file wouldn't fill the full stripe across all (or even a majority) of the drives. Smaller stripe sizes = worse performance, and small drive transactions = large (relative) overhead on USB.

[Olaf6541]

4 hours ago, AbydosOne said:

because you can only address 127 USB devices

This, and a ssd is basically a striped array of flash chips with a controller so what you're trying to create is just a (very) complicated form of solid state drives... 

[HKG]

Also, USB drives do not last long if you are writing data to them 24/7. Like a few months tops.

[Mikensan]

15 minutes ago, HKG said:

Also, USB drives do not last long if you are writing data to them 24/7. Like a few months tops.

at 2TB I'm willing to argue he's referring to USB hard drives, not thumb drives.

[AbydosOne]

5 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

at 2TB I'm willing to argue he's referring to USB hard drives, not thumb drives.

Nope, they were talking thumb(-ish) drives.

[Mikensan]

20 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

Nope, they were talking thumb(-ish) drives.

Ah, should've picked my head up off the desk and finished reading - missed OP saying kingston followed by "fash drives" there at the end... oi vai does my foot taste bad.

[Emerald_Eagle]

10 hours ago, AbydosOne said:

Not to that extent, because you can only address 127 USB devices from one controller (7-bit address). Kinda depends on whether the TB3->USB3 is considered a separate controller.

 

And that's besides the fact Windows basically won't let you combine removable devices together in any useful fashion (I can't even RAID together two normal HDDs in a USB 3.1G2 dock).

 

Also, having a 640-device wide stripe would be useless, because at most reasonable stripe sizes, a given file wouldn't fill the full stripe across all (or even a majority) of the drives. Smaller stripe sizes = worse performance, and small drive transactions = large (relative) overhead on USB.

So if I understand what your saying correctly, I would need a system board that has more than one host controller for USB devices, and rather a board that has say 8 of them?  Albeit a stupid idea, I was merely curious at the possibilities.

[Emerald_Eagle]

11 hours ago, Mikensan said:

The issue is if the software will let you - for example Storage Spaces will not let you use removable media. FlexRAID may let you - I've never used it but I do not know the limitations of it.

 

FreeBSD / Linux however may give you a little more wiggle room since this will show up as a device which you can feed to MDADM or ZFSraid.

 

Just keep in mind RAID is for availabilty - making data available even in the event of disk failure. If you don't have a need for such uptime then RAID may be more work than it is worth. If you just one target or a giant pool of disks to throw data at you may want another solution than RAID.

My theory was to RAID them together via windows, sure performance hit, it's supposed to be big and stupid not practical.  Lol :)

[Mikensan]

12 hours ago, Emerald_Eagle said:

My theory was to RAID them together via windows, sure performance hit, it's supposed to be big and stupid not practical.  Lol :)

Unfortunately neither the old school windows software raid (true performance hit) or the much newer and improved storage spaces (no performance hit - better in a lot of ways) will not take removable storage.

 

If you could trick windows into thinking they were local disks, you could get away with it.