I really like simple things. I got this press release today about a DIY (do it yourself) flash hard drive using little more than six SDHC cards. SDHC cards are simple things. This tech comes straight out of Germany and almost as good as that is, it sells for just $102 US (SDHC cards not included).
The Flexi-drive S2S is slim and supposedly fast. The modular design can handle SD cards up to 32GB meaning you can build up to a 192GB drive. And because it is a flash drive, it is silent, uses little power, and it typically unaffected by shock so its perfect for a drive on the go. Sweet!
I can hear you asking about speed. Sharkoon, the manufacturer, tested six 8GB SDHC memory cards with Class 6 speed ratings. The drive was clocked at reading at 140 MB/s and a write speed of 115 MB/s with HD-Tune. Respectable numbers for sure. I wonder how it will fare in the real world.
The drive will be available from retail partners now.
Product page [Sharkoon]
Cool little thing, but 32GB SD cards are still a bit up there in price, aren't they? $40 a piece at least, and that's going to be for the lowest quality. SSD disks are $260 for 128GB, and this is 192GB for $342, so you're paying a little less for a substantial drop in performance.
Ever tried using an SD card? They suffer (badly) from the fact that they have a much lower write-cycle rating than the memory used in "proper" SSDs. Fine for taking a few photos and clearing the card every few days, but no use for an operating system.
32GB cards arent bad i just picked up 6 of them on ebay for $21 a pop
This would increase your chance of hardware failure by six times. If one goes the whole thing goes. Not a good idea.
I would agree spend a little more cash to get more reliability.
One important piece of data missing, Flash cards as pictured above have a limited amount of reads and writes, due to a Hard drive reading and writing sectors constantly the flash cards wouldn't last anymore than 8 months.
I imagine it's pretty reliable, non-moving components don't fail very often… but this article is a couple of years old, today you can get a much larger solid state drive for close to the same price and probably much better performance.
@Derek
Good point if it's true… I didn't realize SD cards had a limited amount of reads and writes, I've never had one fail but then again I've never tried to use it in place of a hard drive.