I made a Ceph cluster of of USB drives

Hardware Hub Storage
, ,
1

fdae76d0-04e2-437d-8fae-fd1db2a22bab
fdae76d0-04e2-437d-8fae-fd1db2a22bab1920×2560 434 KB

So I went to Walmart and purchased 5 USB flash drives. I have 4 64gb drives and one 128 drive. (not pictured) They are all USB3 sandisk drives and they perform surprisingly well. It isn’t going to compete with proper storage any time soon but for small data it works perfectly fine. The reason that I went with the Sandisk drives is that I have a 5 year old flash drive that is still working great even though I have abused heavily. Sandisk drives are designed to flip to read only mode when they fail so they should be fine for data protection. I was a little concerned they they don’t have smart but I don’t think that is much of an issue.

Eventually I am going to do a proper benchmark of the cluster but for now I tested it with a simple backup. I got speeds ranging from 200mb/s to 20 mb/s for writes. It seemed to average around 50mb/s for writes although it jumped around quite a bit.

8 Likes
2

HAHA I love this concept, some folks out there would go purchase like 12 jbods just to learn this. You however, thought about it at a low level and came up with a solution.

GOOD WORK dude, if we ever find ourselves working at the same company expect me to push back on ceph.

2 Likes
3

Cool project! Reminds me of the ZFS USB drive replug out of order demo.

That’s an interesting fact, is that true of all Sandisk flash? Do other manufacturers do the same? Do some not?(!)

4

There is not a lot of information on USB drives

1 Like