USB 'Psuedo Floppy' - 8GB solid state raid in an old floppy case

Step 3 Configuration

When the drive is initially plugged in, you should see all four disks appear in your finder/explorer, depending upon your OS. That's it. You're good to go right there. Have fun storing data!

However, if you wanna go that extra step, use your OS's software RAID tools to join them together into a single image.... or mirror them for redundancy. This is extremely easy in Apple's OS X (10.5, for this example). I can't help the Windows folks here, but I know it's doable in some version of the software. NOTE: IF YOU USE A SOFTWARE BASED RAID SETUP, YOU POSSIBLY WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE THIS DRIVE ON ANY OPERATING SYSTEM OTHER THAN THE ONE IT WAS CREATED ON. I'm OK with that, but if you aren't, you'll just have to deal with four separate disks.

That said, use the Disk Utility found in /Applications/Utilities and from the raid tab, you can drag each of your devices in to the list. Select what formatting you want, and if you want to mirror or stripe. You can see the total size change with the various options. Play around, have fun... it's the whole point of this instructable.

Peace,
/z

Comments

[guda1985]

can i do this in windows?

[ferrari484]

i love a mac the next computer of mine is gonna be a mac

[victor888]

Oh mine..awesome job~ what about the performance? Does it really working well? I am kind of looking for one, otherwise I go for ramdisk

[zim]

I have added another step with performance data. These are not fast by any stretch of the imagination, I just had the parts and the time...:)

[zim]

it's not a screamer, but for what i use it for... storing a single 7GB disk image that I copy from time to time, performance is not an issue. I'm sure the software raid slows things down, but I wanted the thing to appear as one image.

[askvictor]

Software RAID doesn't slow things down on modern computers. It uses such a tiny fraction of CPU power as to not be noticable; in fact some people suggest it is faster than hardware RAID (really, hardware RAID is still software RAID just on a dedicated controller, so if your main CPU+software can run the RAID algorithms faster than a dedicated controller...) Either form of RAID should speed up performance in most configurations (mirroring will speed up reading, while possibly slightly slowing writing; striping will speed up everything). I'm more curious whether the single USB cable back to the motherboard could handle the bandwidth; if the speed of each thumbdrive is more than 120MB/s then the bottleneck will be the cable - in which case individual cables back to individual USB controllers would speed things up.

[toaste]

Would you mind running xbench on it for some numbers? I'll bet the software raid is actually improving things a lot over just a single drive.

[zim]

Thanks for the suggestion! I have added screen shots and a quick summary of the XBench results in step 4. As you suspect, there was a huge increase for the striping, not so much for the mirroring or concatenation. I still cant get over my 250G external USB disk being faster than the internal SATA.