I’ve found a bag with a bunch of my old USB sticks I used some time ago. Usually only one or two with maximum capacity is in use, and others are here.

From 64MB to 32GB.

An idea occured to join them all together into RAID, for example, a concatenated disk. In OSX it can be done in a few clicks. The idea is pretty silly but it was interesting to try.

I’ve bought an extender with 12 ports.

Satechi 12 Port USB Hub with Power Adapter & 2 Control Switches

Plugging them all in…

Start the Disk Utility and check that all the sticks are recognized.

Create a “concatenated disk” named “Crazy RAID” and add the sticks into there.

Confirming…

Wait for five minutes and it’s done.

“df” perfectly sees the drive.

Now we can copy something there and check the transfer rate.

Of course, this is just a toy without real usage. All the sticks have different capacity, so the concatenated disk is the only choice in terms of the RAID features. Write speed depends on a particular stick which is currently in use. On concurrent read we may gain some speedup.

But it looks cool!