data transfer Using Multiple USB Connections Simultaneously?

[Schyken]

Okay, question. If I used two identical USB ports on a device and made the system think they were the same thing, essentially allowing for both channels to be used simultaneously (similar to how RAID works) and I connected the end to another device for data transfer. Would I see an increase in performance and speeds due to higher bandwidth? (Here's a graphic I made in paint...)

[ALwin]

Define what your destination and source(s) are, if you are thinking about connecting two or more USB drives to a computer and set them up as RAID then I believe you can do so.

 

But if you have two or more different USB drives with different data on them, what's the point as each source has different data for you to copy onto the destination.  Additionally you can't also connect a single USB drive to two separate ports to transfer data from a computer onto that drive faster.

[Naeaes]

Assuming this was even theoretically possible using USB (which is a standardized language with no such ability) you'd be capped at whatever the device is able to send.

Re-think how RAID0 works, maybe? There are two or more transmitters (hard drives) that the receiver (the sata controller) combines into a single stream with twice the bandwidth of a traditional (non-RAID) system. You have here a single transmitter with two receivers. That does not double the bandwidth even theoretically. RAID0 only works because the receiver can handle twice and more the bandwidth of the transmitters. 

Here's another way of looking at it: Say, the device transmits at the theoretical maximum of USB 2.0, which is 480Mbps. The stream is then split into two, 240MBps each and input though the connectors. Assuming the system is perfectly lossless, you could then re-combine the data streams into one 480Mbps stream. Kind of a back-to-square-one -type deal, right?