Use a bunch of USB Flash drives in a RAID array.

I experimented with creating a striped RAID array using 8 USB flash drives.

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[nyandesu]

"If you’re watching this, you know, years in the future."
This really caught me off guard since I didn't check the upload date.

[rgardner]

You should do this again in 2018 with 256GB drives over USB 3 and see what performance you can get.

[wxyzxdll]

IF only everyone could make videos like this dude. Efficient informative narration, and no stupid music. 5 stars.

[IxodesPersulcatus]

I think a good advantage would be security. You need to use a complete set in order to fully access the data.

[opsimathics]

it is July 2016, time to try out this on USB3.0

[blueberryc]

"A terabyte, which is a whopping amount of storage"
Meanwhile september of 2019, Linus media's petabyte project is completely full

[acanalesc]

8 USB Flash Drives, 1 USB 2.0 Hub.

That Bottleneck....

[kbidols]

I'm watching this in 2024 and remembered one thing. I bought a supposedly 1 TB external HDD around 2009. Initially I thought that it was 1 single HDD with a real 1 TB capacity. Turns out that it consisted of two 500 GB HDD being setup in RAID. So when the drives started to have problems a few years later, I would loose some of the files in it while being able to recover a little amount only. I surely got mad at the external HDD manufacturer, but at the same time I learnt about RAID setup. A valuable life lesson.

[lucielcampbell]

I'm one of those guys watching the video in the future and my first thought was plausible advantage that I believe you missed.

If you use 2x flash drives in RAID 0, it adds a layer of security, meaning they both have to be present in order to access the files. This could be further increased by using encryption.

[wonderpierrot]

Interesting video and subject, but you labeled 256GB as 256MB numerous times, including when doing the eBay search. No hate, I just thought that was a bit humorous.

[cernstormrunner]

I remember back in the day someone plugged in 4 iPod Shuffles to a USB hub and RAIDed them.

Because science

[ythaenagor]

"if you're watching this years in the future" I am, as a matter of fact

[Ioner]

2015....doing it with USB 2.0... :/ Sure a lot of people still use 2.0...but seriously, 3.0 has a massive speed boost...that would've been interesting to see.

[CreeperOnYourHouse]

The reason why you get the bottleneck for read speed with 8 drives is due to there being one USB connection, whereas on your monitor it was 2 which was pushed over a higher bandwidth bus.

[naoki]

Isn't this fundamentally flawed because the bandwidth is one usb port since you're using a hub?

[iwontliveinfear]

There is a significant bottleneck in the hub. Due to the nature of a serial connection, only one device on the hub can be written to/read from at a time. Typically the USB ports on a Motherboard are all on separate channels (there are frequently exceptions for front panels sharing channels). Each separate channel can be accessed independently, creating parallel throughput. However true parallel throughput isn't going to happen with that 10 port hub as the computer can only communicate with one device at a time. The communication is gay enough that 2 drives is noticeable, but that is why it doesn't scale.

[NordicGameplays]

No wonder more then 3 sticks did not make it faster, the USB 2 is bottlenecking. You need at least USB 3 to get an OK result. Asus has a motherboard with USB 3.1 that has a speed of 10 Mbit/s. That would be a lot more interesting.

[CoTeCiOtm]

It would be interesting to do this same experiment but with USB 3.0 devices and ports instead of 2.0

[KuntalGhosh]

Revisiting these old videos are fun.
I was in middle school back in 2014-15. I had a galaxy s5 & i discovered your channel + many others like eevlog, techmoan .
I used to watch photonicinduction & colinfurze in 2010-11 era on my pc. Back then i was in primary school & my friends have never even heard of youtube at that time. No one had a pc.

[EposVox]

Very interesting experiment for a video. You're definitely being limited by the USB 2.0 bus, which is why the speeds dropped off. Hopping up to a USB 3.0 bus/hub should drastically affect that chart.

I was also a bit confused when you said if you wanted to do a redundancy Raid, you'd only need another 128gb drive?
If you're setting up a 1024GB Raid, you'd still need to cover that 1024 with backup drives or else you're not getting a full redundant copy. Maybe I'm missing what you were implying with that. You could, however, in theory, set up 4 256gb as the backup or whatever. Or even have a 1tb hard drive. Potentially.