As of old, unwanted flash drives to collect fast "SSD" for your Mac

Tips Makradar / by admin / December 19, 2019

Each of us has some unnecessary memory sticks lying in a drawer. Well, you know how it usually happens, you lose one, buy another, and is the first in a week. Often we get them as advertising on all kinds of presentations, etc. For me personally, the way it happens, so one point, I thought about the fact that this "good" can be done and decided to combine them with a hub in one large and Drive fast.

The only thing on which you may have to spend money to be USB-hub to connect all flash drives (if you do not have the right). On my MacBook only 2 USB-ports, so I bought myself here is a hub, but in principle you can use any hub that supports USB 3.0. First, I gathered all the construction on first got the stick, but later I turned up a good stick for a great price and I decided to buy and use them.

As you know, the USB-stick show great speed when working with large files, such as films, but with many small files (such as a folder with thousands of images), the situation is much worse. However, if you combine multiple flash drives in a RAID-array - the speed will increase proportionally to the number of connected drives (theoretically). As a result, you will be absolutely vseravno, which files you're dealing with, they will be copied at the same speed regardless of their size. This idea is the essence of the described solution.

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For what it is you may need?

Here are some arguments in favor of a solution that you will need:

if you constantly do not have enough space on the system drive, and are gathering dust in the desk several flash drives;
If you have always dreamed about fast removable disk, but do not want to spend money on pricey SSD-drives;
it is much cheaper per gigabyte cost, even taking into account the purchase of new flash drives, not to mention the use of those that are gathering dust in the "bins";

How to do it?

Firstly, you need to decide how you will use flash drives. I recommend taking 2 or 4, but in fact the setup process is the same. Zhelatelno to stick as much as possible was the same: size, speed, manufacturer; but basically will go any. I will use the four 128-gigabyte flash drives PNYThat cost me $ 160 (80 per couple or $ 40 / pcs.). So I would drive 512 GB.

Second, you need to simultaneously connect them to your Mac, in the case of the MacBook can not do without hubs. I use the MacBook Pro Retina with two USB 3.0 ports, so I bought here is such a hub. Many of them require an external power source, but it can do without it, using power from another USB-ports on your computer. Both ports on my MacBook will be involved, but I will get them instead of 4 port hub.

A little bit of magic

If you bought your Mac recently, you may not know that Apple delivers all of its computers with an incredibly useful application called Disk Utility. Among other things, it also knows how to create a software RAID-arrays. I reformatted your USB drive into Mac OS Extended, because I will only use them on your Mac. The choice is yours, but you'll need a FAT only if you plan to connect them to a PC.

By selecting one of the disks in the sidebar and open RAID tab, we can create two or more disks, virtual RAID-array system means OS X.

RAID-arrays can be of different types (you can read about it Wikipedia), we are three types of "Mirrored RAID-array", "RAID-array with alternating" and "Combined RAID-array." We are interested in the second option, that is, «RAID-array with alternating» (Stripped RAID Set), and select it. Striping means that data will be divided into two discs, which (theoretically) gives an increase in speed exactly twice.

After selecting the above options, we need to drag and drop from the sidebar discs that we want to use our RAID-array. Be careful not to put any extra drive. Now click the Create button and confirm our selection (this will erase all data on the disk and format them):

That's it, now you have a ready-RAID. Do not be put off by the fact that the side panel still shows 4 disks, they are visible only in the Disk Utility, - in the Finder, you will have only one common drive.

Nice thing is that the RAID configuration is stored ports to which you connect the USB drive. The main thing that they were connected at the same time and in exactly which ports - does not matter.

A warning

There are several important points that you need to know:

speed boost you get by increasing the number of flash drives from two to four. You can try to connect flash drives 8 through the respective hub, but you will need extra food while you will not see a significant increase in speed.
Use quick, flash drives the same, of course, has a positive effect on the final speed, however, you can easily get 100+ MB / sec by taking simple, ordinary stick.
If one of the flash drives fails, you lose all the data. This is a feature for RAID-arrays interleaved. But to work with the current projects and the data is not so bad, because they are not stored there for a long time and often have a copy. In addition, the failed drive is very easy to find a replacement.
read / write speed is unstable and varies considerably when working with different types of files.

What is the result?

And finally, the test results of my RAID-array assembled from four flash cards, two, and one memory stick connected to the normal mode (for comparison).