DIY SSD made of SD Cards!

Okay, so today's video, yeah, it's a product that doesn't really make sense to me, at least on the surface, this right here is, I actually have the product page behind me, this is, come on, go here , look at this, look at this. This is Highland Star microelectronics, I don't know, anyway, we ordered it from USB Dot Brando Dot-com and this thing here fits like a normal SATA interface with a Sage controller I've never heard of at 10 slots micro SD. That's quality, so yes my friends, today we are going to make our own ssd {click, click} Song: Lazlo Supernova Today's videos brought to you by Tunnel Bear, the simple VPN, try Tunnel Bear for free at Tunnelbear.com /LTT.

I'll have it linked below. So the first step is going to be some RATFAM because while it seems pretty simple in principle, you take the 10 micro SD

cards

that Kingston kindly sent you because you're a famous YouTuber and then you install them into all the things. I want to make sure we are doing it correctly, so instruction note number 1 can use 1 2 4 8 or 10 micro SD

cards

at a time, it does not support 3 5 7 or 9 Instruction step number ii insert the micro sd cards into the micro SD slots one by one as shown in the order of the adapter.

Where is the CHP0L? I just saw COM tf 1 tf 6 tf 2. I think it's for trans flash. Why does this PCB say demo? Alright. We're just going to We're just going to go by the numbers, so where is TF 1 here? Let's do this, wait, type this and then slide it over there, let's go. So the idea here is that you run all of your micro SD cards, which aside from typically being a much lower grade than the nand flash you'd find in an ssd are fundamentally the same: you run them all in RAID 0 to compensate for the fact that a typical micro SD card will be able to perform from 20 to perhaps 80 to 90 megabytes per second reads and writes, while a typical SSD, especially a SATA 3, can saturate a SATA 3 interface at around 500mm, about 50 megabytes per second.

However, one problem I foresee is that there is more life. that sequential performance when it comes to SSD and controller dictates what random performance will be like and oh that also ignores the other issue which is that the flash on a typical microsd card is not only slower but also less resilient than the higher quality things. on a regular SSD, a problem that's compounded, all of this has to do with the problems with this, hey, compounded by the fact that you're running all of this on RAID 0, so a dead micro SD card means your data They're gone, so for better or worse, it's now a 1.2 terabyte micro SD RAID 0 SATA SSD.

I don't know what it is, let's connect it. This is so dumb it's cool, but it's like why is there no way 1.16 terabytes of usable space, let's call this drive letter k has something special. So now I'm a little lost because I'm going to leave you behind the curtain for a second while I was preparing this video, I actually realized that this was probably not going to work because I hadn't read the instructions ahead of time and I realized that It says here it doesn't support uhs-1 and these are clearly uhs-1 cards so I was hoping I would like to continue.

An excursion to buy better and return? But it's working so let's try it, I guess it's okay, so if I told you we have the stupidest special k ssd drive in the world here, how would you compare it? It's 10 micro SD cards on a PCB, we could use Crystaldiskmark, ATTO disk benchmark. I'm going into this with literally no expectations whatsoever, actually with 512 bytes, that's true, even that bad, it's a queue depth of eight, so just to be clear, this is very unrealistic for a load of desk job, okay? So there are a couple of conclusions here Number one is that our drive is actually sata and number two is that the performance is actually better than I expected, but this is just sequential, this doesn't really tell us anything about how it would perform in a real-world workload. with crystal drive branding just for lulz oh wow um we're still going to run the pass test I guess but this doesn't look good for random performance, it's working as you would expect from a bad SSD four or five years ago because There is a lot more performance to SSD than just taking a bunch of nand flash and writing and reading in parallel for more speed, the controller intelligence needs to be high to improve oh wow these randoms.

The numbers are terrible, okay. So for our last trick, it only passes the thread test, so the average latency here doesn't really tell us the whole story because where you really feel the slowness of a drive is when it increases. That's what most modern SSDs do. Are you really trying to overcome those spikes and latency that is when you click on something and you feel like your computer is like? So we're seeing spikes up to almost half a second on this drive and a lot of them stay here for about a fifth of a second, so while you can run an operating system on this thing, I wouldn't really recommend it and to push that point.

At home, in fact, I've spent the last half hour waiting for Windows to install from a USB drive and I'm still 81% into preparing the files for installation. This thing is painfully slow, to the point where I'm having a real hard time figuring out what its purpose might be because you might say, well, you know maybe the disposable data you need is faster than a hard drive? But not as fast as an SSD like a Steam game library, but still the cost is so high filling this with 64 or 128 gig microsd cards like we did would cost more than just buying a proper SSD like a crucial mx 500 or a wd blue, so I'm not sure why it exists, but it does.

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I thought like subscribe maybe consider checking where to buy maybe not this thing but maybe SD cards and the site where we got this also has a lot of other random cool gadgets so you can check them out at the link. Also linked in the video description is our merch store which has cool t-shirts like this and our community forum which you should totally join.