Using multiple large USB memory devices as main memory.

[tcmtech]

I have been seeing these 256 Gb USB flash drives and six USB pot PCI cards on eBay going for reasonable prices lately so can I use six 256 Gb USB stick and one card to work the same as six individual 250 Gb hard drives but with far less power consumption or moving parts?

Is massive low power consuming memory that cheap and simple?

**broken link removed** $9.98 each.

**broken link removed** $9.49 each.

 

[birdman0_o]

Weird, the 256 Gb feels too good to be true.

 

[birdman0_o]

These ones are selling for about 80x more
kingston datatraveler 310,dt310 | eBay

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Weird, the 256 Gb feels too good to be true.

VERY much so, and in any case aren't USB FLASH drives far slower than hard drives, and only have a limited write life.

 

[tcmtech]

I am not sure. Are all Kingston's not created equal?

Here is the exact one I bought for $21.99
(Kingston Datatraveler 300)

**broken link removed**

I will let you know in a few weeks when it gets here.

in any case aren't USB FLASH drives far slower than hard drives, and only have a limited write life.

I think that depends on where you are using and comparing them. My present thumb drive runs consistently at around 20 Mbs transfer rate and all of my external hard drives that use a USB port connection are about the same give or take a few meg.

The problem I have is that at my external hard drives seem to only last until about 2 - 3 months after their warranty expires, regardless of manufacturer, whether they get used regularly or not. However my 8 Gb memory stick has been around for 2 abusive and heavily used years and still seems to perform like it did the day I got it.

I am thinking about setting up one of my older slower computers as a main data archive system that has the lowest possible idle power consumption despite having a rather sizable memory capacity.

Basically what I am wanting to experiment with is large solid state memory capacity on the cheap using a older lower powered computer from the early 2000's era thats windows XP pro compatible.

I am just not sure about running a large number of memory sticks all at once with no actual internal hard drive installed though.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I am just not sure about running a large number of memory sticks all at once with no actual internal hard drive installed though.

I've run Linux from a flash drive, with no HDD installed - but it wasn't very fast.

 

[Reloadron]

I don't see it as very viable. First I agree with Nigel in that it is slow. The maximum bandwidth for a USB type device under USB 2.0 is only 400 Mbit/Sec. Then the matter of the number of times the media can be written to.

While like many I have played around running a few Linux distros from a USB drive I never had any luck running a Windows type OS from a thumb drive.

With the advent of newer solid state hard drives the cost of the older mechanical hard drives has dropped and as the new drives get improved capacity the lower capacity SSHDs have dropped in price.

Anyway, I just don't see using thumb drives as a viable project. Might be fun to screw around with but I don't see much if any promise to it.

Ron

 

[MrAl]

Hi,

I pretty much agree with all of the cons everyone has been mentioning here. The main issues are the speed and write cycle life. Some of the flash drives are very very slow, averaging around 1-2 megabytes per second write time although the read time can be pretty high. That's because the addressing technique for the flash drives is much different than for hard drives or ram. Even if we write a 1k file to a flash drive it may have to write as much as 64k or 128k just to get that one file written. That's the technology difference and it shows up the most during the write of many small files that would write fast on a hard drive. You'll see a better performance with larger files because for something like 10MB it will just keep writing 128k blocks for example and all that is part of the file so it appears to be faster, on the order of 5 to 10 megabytes per second for example. Some of the drives are advertised as being in a higher speed class and although they are they will still be slower when say copying a large number of smaller files.

Then there is the issue of whether or not the flash drive uses an intelligent wear algorithm. If it does it might last longer, but once the cycles are used up that's it. For an operating system that has to constantly write new data i dont see it working for more than say 6 months maybe, but that's hard to say really. Even the solid state drives have some wear problems from what i've read. That kept me from buying one until they improve and the good ones are not 200 dollars each.

 

[nostra16]

tcmtech, you might want to check this website : Fake Flash Memory - Internet Watchdog

I was buying a 32Gb miniSD card for my smart-phone two days ago, found to low to be real prices, searched a bit and found that website. I had bought the item, and luckily got an e-mail from eBay saying the seller had been detected as fraud. I got a full refund.

Anyhow I wish your case is not similar!

Regards,

J.