DIY SSD made of SD Cards!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,484 words · ~7 min read
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okay so today's video yeah it's a product that really makes no sense to me at least on the
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surface this right here is i've actually got the product page up behind me this is come come on
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come on come on get in here check this out check this out this is the i don't know highland star
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micro electronica anyway we ordered it from usb.brando.com and this doodad right here adapts
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as regular SATA interface with some controller from sage that i've never heard of to 10 micro sd
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slots that's quality right there so yes my friends today we're going to make our own SSD today's
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video is brought to you by tunnelbear the simple vpn try tunnelbear for free at tunnelbear.com
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LTT we're going to have that linked below so step one is going to be some r-ing t effing m because
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while
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it does seem fairly straightforward in principle you take the 10 micro sd cards that kingston
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graciously sent you because you're a famous youtuber and then you install them in all the
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things i do want to make sure that we are doing it correctly so instructional note number the first
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you can use one two four eight or oh my goodness 10 micro sd cards at one time it does not support
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three five seven
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or nine instructional step number the second insert the micro sd cards into the micro sd slots
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one by one as the order shown on adapter where is chp0l i just see con tf1 tf6 tf2 i think that's
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for trans flash why does this pcb say demo on it okay well we're just gonna we're just gonna go
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where's here's tf1 let's do this thing am i doing this right you put it down and then you slide it
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there we go so the idea here is that it runs all of your micro sd cards which aside from being a
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much lower grade typically than the nan flash that you would find in an SSD are fundamentally the
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same thing it runs them all in raid zero to make up for the fact that a typical micro sd card
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will be capable of anywhere from 10 to 20 micro sd cards so i'm just going to make sure that i'm not
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from, you know, 20 to maybe 80 to 90 megabytes a second reads and writes, whereas a typical SSD,
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especially a SATA 3 one, can saturate a SATA 3 interface at around, you know, 550 or so megabytes
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per second. One problem that I do foresee, though, is that there's more to life than sequential
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performance when it comes to SSDs, and the controller dictates what the random performance
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will be like. And, oh, that too ignores the other problem, which is that the flash on a typical
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microSD card is not only slower, but also less resilient than the higher quality stuff on a
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normal SSD. A problem that is compounded, this is all about the problems with this thing, hey,
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compounded by the fact that you're running this whole thing in RAID 0. So one dead microSD card
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means, poof, there goes your data. It's gone.
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So there it is. For better or for worse, this is now a 1.2 terabyte RAID 0 microSD SATA SSD. I
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don't know what it is. Let's plug it in. This is so dumb. It's like, cool, but it's like, why?
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There it is. No way. 1.16 terabytes of usable space.
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Let's call this drive letter K, because it's special. So I'm actually a bit of a loss now,
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because I'm going to let you guys behind the curtain for a second here. While I was prepping
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this video, I actually realized that this probably wasn't going to work, because I hadn't gone
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through the instructions ahead of time, and I just noticed that it says right here, do not support
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and these are quite clearly UHS-I cards. So I was expecting to like go on a field trip to Best Buy
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and come back. But it's working. So let's let's test it, I guess. Okay, so if I told you we have
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the world's stupidest SSD, special K drive here, how would you benchmark it? It's 10 microSD cards
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on a PCB.
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We could use Chris.
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We could use CrystalDiskBrack, we could use Atto.
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Yes. I'm coming into this with literally no expectations whatsoever. Actually, at 512 byte,
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that's not even that bad, is it? This is at a queue depth of eight, though. So to be clear,
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this is very unrealistic for a desktop workload. Okay, so there's a couple of takeaways here.
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Number one is that our drive is indeed SATA 2. And number two is that the performance is actually
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better than I thought.
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Unexpected. But this is just sequential. This doesn't really tell us anything about how it would
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perform in a real world workload. Let's hit it with CrystalDiskBrack just for lulz. Oh, wow.
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We're still going to run the passmark test, I guess, but this is not looking good for random
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performance. This is performing about like you'd expect from a bad SSD four or five years ago,
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because there's a lot more to SSD performance than just
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taking a...
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A bunch of NAND flash and writing to and reading from it in a parallelized manner to get more speed
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out of it. The controller intelligence has to be high in order to get better. Oh, wow. These random
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numbers, these are awful.
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Okay. So for our last trick, passmark disk thread test. So the average latency here doesn't really
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tell us the whole story.
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So here's the thing. The thing that just really impacts the performance of a drive
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is the speed or speed of it. You can see, it's a little picture-ish, but you really feel the
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slowness of a drive is when it spikes. That's what most modern SSDs are really trying to overcome,
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is those spikes in latencies. That's when you click on something and you feel like your computer's
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like . So we are seeing spikes up to almost half a second on this drive, with a lot of them
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actually sitting here around a fifth of a second.
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So...
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While you could...
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Run an OS on this thing,
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So... while you could...
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really wouldn't recommend it and to drive that point home I've actually
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spent the last half an hour waiting for Windows to install off a USB drive and
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it's still at 81% of getting files ready for installation this thing is kind of
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painfully slow like to the point where I'm having a really hard time figuring
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out what its purpose could possibly be because you might go oh well you know
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maybe disposable data that you need to be faster than a hard drive but not as
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fast as an SSD like a Steam game library but even then the cost is so
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high to fill this thing with 64 gig or 128 gig micro SD cards like we did would
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cost more than just buying a proper SSD like a Crucial MX 500 or a WD blue so
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I'm not sure why it exists but it does and it's cool so there it is and you
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know what else is cool Dollar Shave Club if you haven't for whatever reason sign
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8:40
gonna have that link below and join the club so thanks for watching guys if you
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just like this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
8:47
subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the maybe not that this
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thing but maybe the SD cards and and that site actually where we got this has
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lots of other cool random gadgets as well so you can check that out at the
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link in the video description also link down there is our merch store which has
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cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally
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join