USB Hard Drive Clusters

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tom.Bioinf
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Tom.Bioinf

I had an idea a few nights ago, and i could do with some expert advice.
:-
As prices for hard disks, and also for USB2 Accessories, such as hubs
and enclosures are low, would it be feasible to create a mass storage
solution on this infrastructure.

So. Computer has 2 USB2 ports
Each goes to a 4 port hub
out of the 4 port hub is another 4 port hub, so giving 2(3+4) set of
ports.
so this could either give you 7 or 14 extra ports.

For simplicity, say it was the 7 port one.
Each port out of 7 goes to a usb2 hard drive enclosure, and each with a
80GB Maxtor or other cheapo hard disk.

As only one disk would be written at a time, the total speed should
remain at 480Mbps?

Questions:
1) Would this be a cost effective mass storage method?
2) How large could the clusters get before it exceeds USB2 speed
limits(and the speed drops)?

Thanks In Advance
Tom O'C
 
Tom.Bioinf said:
I had an idea a few nights ago, and i could do with some expert advice.
:-
As prices for hard disks, and also for USB2 Accessories, such as hubs
and enclosures are low, would it be feasible to create a mass storage
solution on this infrastructure.

So. Computer has 2 USB2 ports
Each goes to a 4 port hub
out of the 4 port hub is another 4 port hub, so giving 2(3+4) set of
ports.
so this could either give you 7 or 14 extra ports.

For simplicity, say it was the 7 port one.
Each port out of 7 goes to a usb2 hard drive enclosure, and each with a
80GB Maxtor or other cheapo hard disk.

As only one disk would be written at a time, the total speed should
remain at 480Mbps?

Questions:
1) Would this be a cost effective mass storage method?
2) How large could the clusters get before it exceeds USB2 speed
limits(and the speed drops)?

Thanks In Advance
Tom O'C
Click to expand...
Looking through your ideas, it seems as though it is feasible.
Personally I prefer a good RAID setup (RAID 5) as it gives you the mass
storage with a good redundancy level and error correction level. What
you are suggesting would not cost any less than a fairly good SATA RAID
assembly, or even an IDE assembly as the expansion cards are fairly
cheap now. Essentially you are looking at purchasing 4-4 Port USB hubs,
and as many drives as you can handle, but with those drives you will
also require the external enclosures which in turn will require seperate
power sources, and so on and so on. At this point you are looking at a
fairly heavy load, then you get into the subject of reliability. While I
have yet to have any MAJOR problems with my external enclosures (3), I
still have the odd glitch that requires a reboot. As for the question of
"How large can it get"... I could not tell you, and I will venture a
guess that not many could as it all depends on hardware used, etc. This
is just my opinion, and others will disagree.
 
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