Stripe Thumb Drives??

[CH12671]

Has anyone out there tried to stripe USB 3.0 thumb drives...say 3 or more 16 or 32 gig sticks, attached to a hub, to make a "cheap" raid array? If so, what were the results?
Maybe would be even better to attach 2 32 or 64 gig thumb drives to separate USB ports, rather than to a hub....might increase read/write rates? Seems like it should work....

 

[simsaladimbamba]

A 64 GB SSD might be cheaper than two 32 GB USB flash storage thumb drives. The same goes for 128 GB SSDs and so on.

 

[ActionableMango]

If you Google "Daniel Olson raid" you will see that OS X will apparently RAID just about anything USB. Notably, he did a striped raid of five USB 3.5" floppy drives, and a striped RAID of Sony Memory Sticks in USB memory readers.

So yes, I see no reason that this wouldn't technically work in OS X.

It seems like a bad idea though. Most USB 3.0 flash drives use fairly slow flash. There are some exceptions, for example the Sandisk Extreme will actually do about 200-250MB/s (SSD territory), but then the cost per GB greatly exceeds an SSD anyway. So why not just get SSDs and save money? Also, USB has high CPU overhead.

Like the floppy RAID, this probably would work and maybe its interesting, but it doesn't seem practical.