How crazy would it be to use USB flash storage for Ceph?

Part of me wants to just jump the gun to see what happens.

I got to looking and it appears that a decent sandisk 256GB USB drive is only like $20. I am looking to store around 15gb of storage at most so theoretically it should wear out that fast. I have a 5 year old USB that I use pretty heavily for ISOs and it works great. Would it be that crazy to buy USB drives for Ceph?

My plan is to add the OSDs and then use Ceph as a backup target just for testing. I will let it run for a month and report back to see what happens.

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Please let me know how because i have a bunch of flash drives and raspberry pis and i can’t get the flash drives to work but research says that there is a way

Cluster is always talking and doing stuff. USB drives cant really handle load. I expect the very slowness and probably timeouts and Ceph going crazy because drives not able to keep up. OSDs going down and possibly out → likely

As soon as you pull a drive or an OSD goes down and Ceph does recovery and backfill, that will seal the fate and cluster becomes totally unresponsive because USB drives are write throttling now as well. Good luck reading any amount of data from that Cluster.

Stupid idea cause it’s the worst kind of drive for the job, USB drives, SD cards,etc. are trash flash. Works great on ZFS, but ZFS isn’t shuffling around stuff all the time to balance placement groups.

Don’t put valuable data there. Get real drives with PLP and Ceph will fulfill all your wishes.

grab a USB to SATA adapter and send it