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SATA SDHC RAID spotted
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 12th August 2008
The device takes six SDHC cards and combines them in a SATA-presented RAID 0 array.
The PhotoFast CR-9000 device, spotted on Japanese website Impress by Gizmodo is a SATA-connected 2.5” device which takes up to SDHC flash memory cards and presents them to the host PC as a single logical drive.
Available in Japan at a price of ¥9,980 (about £48) the unit has a low entry cost so long as you've got a bunch of matching SDHC cards already lying around. While the performance can't match a custom-built drive, Impress were able to get a pretty impressive 111.4MB/s read and 55.2MB/s write when combining the device with six Transcend 8GB Class 6 SDHC cards.
Perhaps most interestingly is the lack of backwards compatibility on the drive itself – the device supports SDHC cards of 4GB or higher only, without the capability to utilise smaller SD cards that one would expect of an SDHC-aware device. 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.
With the cost of real SSD drives dropping by the day – and the performance ever rising – I can't help but feel that this gadget serves more purpose as a proof-of-concept than a serious upgrade. I'm especially worried as to the idea of a RAID 0 array spanning six SDHC cards, with the knowledge that it only takes a single card's death to send all my precious data to the graveyard.
Can you think of a use for the CR-9000, or is it destined to be nothing more than a novelty for people with more SDHC cards than they know what to do with? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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;) I think the "6" is missing...
nice concept though
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.