So I had tossed around the idea of using Thumb drives in a RAID or for NAS storage a couple of times. These drives are finally getting big enough for this thought to be worthwhile. Looks like in 2006 someone experimented with this idea using cheap (512mb drives) seems like there were significant performance gains using the drives in Raid 0. however they were cheap and caused raid issues.

So is this thought any more a reality with these newer drives and bigger sizes? may be forget the thumb drive and opt for compact flash card/memory sticks, or similar devices?

I see 2GB flash drives for 8 bucks and 4gb for 13.5 ($3.37/gb) and 8gb for 25 ($3.12/gb) 16gb for 50 ($3.12/gb) and 32gb for 125 ($3.12Nothing near the $0.20/gb for spinning drives. but i feel the speed at which disc drives are increasing is size is much slower than flash or SSD. SSD discs are still rather expensive at this time. Seems like grabbing a hand full of 4gb/8gb thumb drives and throwing them in raid 0 would destroy some benchmarks. However, I have no idea what hardware raid could use thumb drives, seems like it would be limited to software raid.

Just think about $200 bucks would get you 4x16gb flash drives. could do a raid 0 of 64gb or raid 0+1 of 32gb.

Seems like a gamers dream/cheap performance nas if it could work. Any thoughts?

maybe so, but keep in mind that those drives were designed with limited writes, so you'll burn through them pretty quickly if you install an os or games. maybe go ahead and get 8, go raid 0+1, and then swap them out as they fail, haha.

The original post is ...... well.....

Check out what nas is, and you will find out its not hdd perofrmance limiting them, its network bandwidth and or poor raid performance (due to poor processors)

What kinda read write speed do you get with those usb drives? Since they are cheap max read/write about 30/20 tops. So you need about 4 of them in raid 0 to match performance of a cheap 7200 rpm hdd (except of course there would be a lower seek time of usb sticks),

Redundancy as the usb sticks are not designed for a huge amount of writes you would need more usb sticks for mirroring.

---"Just think about $200 bucks would get you 4x16gb flash drives. could do a raid 0 of 64gb or raid 0+1 of 32gb"---
would be absolute rubbish performance. 200 dollars could get you:
One-hxxp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132010
Four-hxxp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145162
put it all in raid 0 and that should give you nice performance and 600 plus gigs of storage