RAIDs (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive [sic] Disks) are considered pretty handy for a number of things. This is an example of productive and practical use of a RAID. Granted, this project does not have the archaic grandeur of a Floppy Disk RAID, but then again, the capacity and performance of this system are utterly superior to those of a Floppy Disk RAID. The following is meant as an instruction sheet of how to build a rock-hard USB stick RAID system and simultaneously transform from an ordinary nerd to a SUPER LINUX GURU.
Get your sticks together and go here.
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At one time, I worked in a place that used "Dell" desktop systems for all the employees' workstations. Given that anything important was supposed to be kept on the network servers to be backed up, there was a lot of wasted space on those machines' local hard drives.
I never tried this, but I considered experimenting with the following scenario:
1)Set up a shared directory on each workstation's disk.
2)Create a large empty file of the same size in each directory.
3)Mount each directory via mount.cifs and, treating the files as virtual hard drives, combine them into a RAID array.
It would probably perform about as well as the USB stick RAID does if it worked at all...but at least it'd be a way to put all the wasted space on the Windows™ systems to better use.
Posted by: SMC | November 27, 2007 9:47 PM