The other day I had what I thought was a great idea - I could buy up a bunch of cheap USB 2.0 drives and fill up the spaces in my 7-port USB hub for a super-fast RAID device! But in the light of day it isn't looking so good. I think that this would give me faster read times at least, but how would write times fare? Which RAID level would be best suited for this purpose? (I am trying to optimize for speed, any data doesn't need to be particularly safe.)
If this is a "good idea", or at least not completely foolhardy, how would I go about setting this up? I run Ubuntu 12.10 and Windows 8.
Answer
Well, it looks like the limitations of a single USB 2.0 bus would cripple this idea. For some speed gain, I could use two flash drives per bus and use multiple buses (there are two on my laptop) for a total of 70 MB/s (Wikipedia says maximum throughput per bus is 35 MB/s, and each flash drive gives me roughly 20MB/s). However, this isn't that much - it looks like it was more feasible back in the days of floppy drives.
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