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

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Hello! Welcome to another episode.

I got this crazy idea the other day.

I bought this 10-port USB hub from eBay for like 8 bucks

and I bought this in order to transition my server away from Firewire

since Firewire's been abandoned by the industry

and so I'll be plugging in all of my external hard drives via USB,

but I had this crazy idea to connect a whole bunch of flash drives to this thing

to see if I could set 'em up as RAID.

My first experiment was just to connect two 8GB drives to the USB ports on my monitor.

I tried copying a 900MB file to the first drive and it took about 4 minutes 17 seconds to write

and then I performed a read test and it took 48 seconds

So, the next thing I did was to go into the Disk Utility and configure both drives as a RAID.

This was a success and I now had a single 16GB drive as far as my computer was concerned.

I tried the same test again and found that the speed was essentially doubled.

I now had a write time of 2 minutes and 6 seconds in a read time of 25 seconds.

Now, I had wondered how the system would handle me disconnecting these and reattaching them.

Would it matter what order I put them back?

As it turns out, no: as soon as I connected the second drive, it would immediately remount to my desktop.

I even tried it on a totally different Mac and it remounted right up as soon as I connected both drives.

I even tried it on an old G4 system running Leopard and they mounted right up.

Alright, for the large-scale test I decided I wanted to use this laptop