[geeks] industrial USB flash drives, and other solid state Solaris storage

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>Date: 2008/04/20 Sun AM 02:27:38 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] industrial USB flash drives, and other solid state   Solaris  storage

<snip>

>It's a neat idea, but if I used USB I'd just use one drive, and only  
>if I could make it internal.

Obviously you can on the T105, but for other systems, I just had a thought - I wonder if anyone makes a PCI or even PCI-Express add-in cards that have multiple USB ports *internal* - it would be interesting to have, say, four internal USB connectors (for USB thumbdrives), each with their own controllers on an add-in card. That would mean you could take four 16 Gig USB drives[0] and have up to a 64 Gig (or so) storage pool, and with seperate controllers, you could go to some fun RAID solutions (like RAID 5 or even a cool thumper-like ZFS storage pool [1];^)...

If I were to design such a card, I'd orient the sockets in a way that allows for a full-height or low-profile installation and have small holes on either side of the typical thumbdrive profile, to allow a zip tie to hold the flash drives in-place. 

Lionel

[0] http://microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?coordinate_group=HD3R

[1] http://youtube.com/watch?v=1zw8V8g5eT0

Lionel