*stands up* Hi my name is ak47gen and I am a linuxholic

[unlotto]

I'm curious to know why you could not just make the partitions the size of the smallest of the cards?

[ak47gen]

The brand i uses was the Geek squad U3 *on sale* (make sure you remove the U3 part) drives, there avarage read speed where 20 MB/S each. Problem with flash drives is not every drive is the same size, each 4 GB could of been 4110 MB, 4052 MB, or 4044 MB. I found out most flash drives are this way for some reason.

So if you do this i suggest a few things

1. Buy it local so you can exchange it when needed
2. Find drives that are fast, most they can range from 5-25 MB/S read and 2-19 MB/S write
3. With raid 0 make sure there all the same size
4. If you can use multiple host USB controllors, most cap out around 50 MB/s but can go up to 60. (i have 6, 2 on the mainboard, 2 pci cards, 2 pci express cards)
5. if done right your looking at ~$200 for a ~210 MB/S drive with response times as low as 70 Microseconds for 52 GBs.(so a lot of money for little space, but faster than a x3 raptors on raid 0 *which is ~$400).

[DeepDayze]

Maybe I'll check it out, OP. Did you suggest what brands of flash drives that work well with your setup? Hmm, Flash drive RAID...sounds pretty interesting indeed

[ak47gen]

Thank you,

It took about a week, because it took a lot of returns and buys to get it right. The hard part was figuring out to set the USB.delay to 0, not a whole lot of support on that. Other than that I have done many gentoo installs so it was easy.

P.S. sorry for posting it 3 times, it took me a second to relize why it didn't go through (lack of sleep aided that one).

[Michael]

Interesting, very nice job. How long did that take to configure?

[ak47gen]

Good evening...well morning in my case.

I am fasinated with your benchmark system, after i was told to go here from AnandTech. I posted a topic http://forums.anandtech.com/messagev...&enterthread=y about my linux flash drive raid and someone mention from AnandTech that I should submit my info to phoronix.

If your interested on the boot speed you can see it here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozA2ie10A6w#

But as of now i am downloading all the programs from phoronix benchmark tool. Soon I will have a better estimate of how fast my x13 flash drive raid will perform under this.

Let me know if this concept fascinates anyone and that you possible want to inquire more info. I spent a good time setting this up (flash drives suck because out of 5, 4gb drives only 2-3 will be the have the same sectors/head/cylinders).

P.S. i did bonnie++ benchmarks but this phoronix tool, I have to give a lot of credit for being very easy and awesome to get all the benchmarks.