USB drive Array?

**EBFoxbat** · 01-08-2005, 02:34 PM

Is there a way to combine several USB flash drives (keychain type) to appear as a single drive?

Umm... a USB keychain array I guess? Or am I looking at having X,Y,Z drives?

**jarubio** · 01-08-2005, 05:07 PM

EBFoxbat, I have not heard of that, theoreticly I do not see why it can't be done. I think the easiest way to do it is using SW RAID. If you want speed, use RAID 0, if you want redundancy, use RAID 5. SW RAID is only available in Windows 2000/2003 Server or almost any distribution of Linux.
Can any one in the forum expand on this or give more specifics?

**EBFoxbat** · 01-08-2005, 05:12 PM

Originally Posted by jarubio

SW RAID is only available in Windows 2000/2003 Server or almost any distribution of Linux.

Ironic because I am contemplating doing this for my xbox, which would run Linux. Can SW RAID run ruickly enough?

**Change** · 01-08-2005, 09:11 PM

Originally Posted by EBFoxbat

Ironic because I am contemplating doing this for my xbox, which would run Linux. Can SW RAID run ruickly enough?

I'm running software RAID 1 on several servers I admin, one is a CL10000-based system and the other is an M10000-based system and they both work just fine

(BTW, this is truly a spiffy case

)

*UPDATE*

Here's a great document on software RAID in Linux: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

**starfox** · 01-08-2005, 11:09 PM

What did you want to do? Boot off the xbox hard drive, then mount a raid array of USB keys? May I ask why do you want to do this?

Sounds interesting.

**EBFoxbat** · 01-09-2005, 12:08 AM

Originally Posted by starfox

May I ask why do you want to do this?

Sounds interesting.

I've decided that I'm going to put Linux on my xbox and run it as my car pc. I'm doing this because I'm out of money and I never use my xbox. I plan on using a 14.1" LCD and using a small keyboard and mouse.

I've been thinking about the possibiliy of putting all my mp3s on flash media. I only have 5 gb or so. Since I could RAID it as say M drive, it would be an entirely read-only drive, thus would work fine. Plus I wouldn't have to worry about tempature hard drive issues.

Can I use a IDE compact flash drive in my xbox instead of a HDD through ?

**jarubio** · 01-09-2005, 08:12 PM

Originally Posted by EBFoxbat

I've decided that I'm going to put Linux on my xbox and run it as my car pc. I'm doing this because I'm out of money and I never use my xbox. I plan on using a 14.1" LCD and using a small keyboard and mouse.

I've been thinking about the possibiliy of putting all my mp3s on flash media. I only have 5 gb or so. Since I could RAID it as say M drive, it would be an entirely read-only drive, thus would work fine. Plus I wouldn't have to worry about tempature hard drive issues.

Can I use a IDE compact flash drive in my xbox instead of a HDD through ?

EBFoxbat, when you create your array, make sure to label your USB drives, if by any chance you mix them up, you will loose the information on them.

Theoretically, you should be able to run IDE compact flash on the Xbox. The Xbox is an X86 system, but I know that Microsoft did some changes, you may still have to mod it.

**EBFoxbat** · 01-09-2005, 09:58 PM

I have a mod chip on the way, this should prevent the need to lock the hard drive.

**hcker2000** · 01-10-2005, 03:49 AM

Let me know if you see any speed boost from this. With out doing the math on this I'm guess that at some point the speed gain (if any) from puting usb drives in a raid array would eventualy come to the point ware adding more drives wouldent increse speed any more. Agine not sure how many drives it would take before this happened but I would take a stab at a low number (3-5 drives).

**EBFoxbat** · 01-10-2005, 12:43 PM

USB 2.0 drives through a USB 2.0 Hub, through a USB 2.0 motherboard bus would probabaly yield good performance.

I would only write to them in large blocks, while transfering audio once a month or so.

I think I'm going to do this with Linux on an xbox. It would all be USB 1 but should still be fine. xBox only supports ATA33 so an ATA-to-compact flash adapter might not give good performance. I'm not sure what to do.