[plug] USB RAID

[Adrian Woodley]

I have a WD 200Gb HD ATA100 with 8Mb of cache in a USB2.0 tray. It
performs only slightly worse than a similar spec (8Mb cache, ATA 100)
drive inside the computer.

If I was gonna build the office server again I would definitely go for
RAID 5 over several USB HDs. We already had to buy a USB2.0 card (most
motherboards come with them onboard now) and we wouldn't have to buy a
second IDE card. The only other expense is USB2.0 trays - ~$150 each.
There are two advantages to this system:-
	Hot swapping drives becomes trivial.
	Moving the system to another computer because a case of unplugging all
the drives, finding another machine with USB2.0 (only if you want full
speed) and plugging them in.

As far as variable names on usb-storage devices, the net mdadm system
should take care of that without any config. Provided there's a MBR on
each drive, lilo should boot the kernel, mount the initrd, start mdadm.
mdadm will detect all the available RAID members and order them
correctly, mount / and start init.

Adrian

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 17:08, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Senectus - wrote:
> 
> | eh? 60mb/sec??? That must be a USB 2 device.. I'm pretty sure that USB1.1's 
> | top is 10mbit...
> 
> Yeah, it's USB 2.  My flash thingy is definitely USB 2 and easily
> several mb/sec.  I'm not sure what USB 1.1's top speed is but the
> fastest I've seen my (USB 1) camera do is ~400kb/sec.
> 
> Cameron.
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