News SATA SDHC RAID spotted

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/08/12/sata-sdhc-raid-spotted/1

Gizmodo has spotted a device on Japanese tech site Impress which turns six SDHC cards into a RAID 0 SATA SSD drive the same size as a traditional notebook disk.

 

I think the "6" is missing...

 

Cool nifty little gagdet, but nothing more I think. Like you say, RAID 0 with 6 SDHC cards, sounds dangerous!

 

hopefully you should be able to recover the data on the other cards if one does die on you.

nice concept though

 

6 SDHC Cards?

So, we're talking a maximum of 48GB using 8GB cards.. It's roughly £15 per card, that makes it £90... Then £48 for the unit..

We're talking £138 for 48GB of SSD storage, here.

Is that really worth it? I can see pretty much no point to this.

 

No option for anything else like RAID 5 then? That would certainly make it more tempting...

 

It is a RAID 0. The data is broken up and striped across the drives. If you save a file, no matter what the size, pieces of that file will be on all the drives. That is how you get the increased read/write speeds. Trust me, if one drive goes, that is it for everything. Even using heavy recovery tools you would only be able to recover small system files that were smaller than the stripe size.

 

simply too slow to be worth it (ssd is faster, like for example ocz core) , besides, how reliable are SDHC cards? I doubt they have a very high mtbf if used 24/7.

 

Raid Data Integrity -- If it weren't for the limitations of laptops, you could always fit two of these drives and set up raid mirroring between them

 

go lookup RAID 0

 

Yep, people commonly refer to RAID 0 as "RAID 0; the number stands for how many files you'll get back if it fails"

 

I'm not sure it should even be allowed to bear the "RAID" moniker. The R does stand for redundant y'know.

 

And yes, you lose one "Disk", you lose everything. Just like a non-RAID1 or RAID5 system. Though if you can identify the bad "Disk", you only need replace that one "disk" to get back the capacity you had. Unlike an SSD, where if the SSD goes down, you have to replace the whole SSD. No data recovery option there, either.

Personally, I think this is a great idea, it's just a shame the cost for the SDHC cards isn't lower. Still, get some 133x (Or higher) cards in there and you'll have a "Drive" that has 0ms random-access time AND massive bandwidth, the holy grail of storage. Stick your Windows partition on that, and store all your media on a 1TB 5400 RPM drive, and your storage won't be the bottleneck anymore.

 

I'd be interested if it was in P2 presentation, as this isn't quite flexible enough yet... looks like it's taking steps toward it - ideal for broadcast media

 

"I'm afraid that you'll have to find another use for those hundreds of 512MB and 1GB cards that seem to accumulate every time you buy a new gadget."

Uhhh my Gadgets are officially limited to 1 GB ;-)
The three devices that do use SD cards (camera, car stereo and navigator) all state that they don't support more than one GB...never tested this though.

 

...so if you have hundreds of spare 512 and 1GB cards... I'd take them for the car stereo :-D