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.
Solution:
I would not suggest using a USB 2.0 raid method as the transfer rate between that and an internal mounted hard drive (SATA or SAS) is significantly slower. Combined with the fact that you are using a USB HUB, it would make the transfer rate even slower thus defeating the purpose of a RAID setup.