Do they make these?

[Kenshin911]

I can't seem to find any info on this anywhere. What I'm looking for is a device that has several USB 2.0 conectors on it which you plug in USB thumb drives into. Then there is an IDE output connector which you attach to the computers IDE port.

The point of this device is that it will provide a flash hard drive to the computer and allow the user to select which flash thumb drives to plug in to build the drive.

Maybe this doesn't exist at all and that's why I can't find it, but I think it would be an excelent idea because the cost of those IDE SSD drives is just too darn much. This way you could configure your SSD however you want by just plugging in thumb drives.

Any thoughts?

 

[ViRGE]

I have seen some prototype IDE SSD drives that use user-installed memory(SD, I think), but that's it. I haven't seen what you propose, nor would I expect it to be built due to a few problems from such a design(IDE cable length, CPU overhead of multiple USB controllers, etc).

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have some PNY S-Cure RAID cards, they have 5 SATA ports, but appear to the PCI to be a standard IDE controller.

There's no reason that someone couldn't build a USB flash-drive RAID, that looked like a standard IDE device (or even plugged into one), but I've never seen one actually built. Sounds like a neat idea. Someone should talk to Gigabyte about building one.

 

[Blain]

You gotta love the Macs. :heart:

 

[Kenshin911]

The mac thing you linked to is not the same. I'm talking about a device that could be used in place of a hard drive. So you could install your OS on it and use it *exactly* as if it was a hard drive.

 

[Roguestar]

But standard USB "thumb drives" wear out after a few hundred thousand read/writes.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Roguestar
But standard USB "thumb drives" wear out after a few hundred thousand read/writes.

It's clearly not a big problem since flash-based SSD disks are coming out with the same limitations.

 

[Roguestar]

Oho. I thought they were of better life expectancy than vanilla USB drives.