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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

Yes but why?

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-ports-Micro-SD-TF-Memory-...

Wow. That's almost exactly what I was looking for last week.

I have an old machine I'd like to turn into a WORM server, but I want it to be silent and would rather re-use a bunch of old memory cards than spend money on new storage.

All I could find was a device that put two MicrSD cards into a single SD card. This is even better.

I'd buy it if there was a USB version, since the computer I want to re-use only has USB ports.

You could put this into a 2.5" external enclosure with a usb 3.0 port.

Why not buy a 2.5" SSD in the first place? It will be cheaper, faster, and more reliable.

Then throw btrfs on it, and you have a sure-fire recipe for data corruption!

I'd be wary of this unless you're planning on multiple levels of redundancy. Those old cards (at least the ones I've collected from phones over the years) are just so poor that you can't rely on them for much.

WORM is a slightly less scary, but I still wouldn't trust them without being able to handle failure of 50% of the cards.

Linus Tech Tips did a video on one of those things:

https://youtu.be/3frnBoqqI_Q

tldr: it seems to work as advertised but he can't find a valid use case for it.

well if you already have the SD cards like GP said...

Just in case you thought it might be a good idea to order that aliexpress thing, it's terrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3frnBoqqI_Q

There's nothing wrong with the adapter per se, it's just that MicroSD cards have terrible random I/O performance.

I was thinking it would be cool as a small NAS with a mirror. I want to put my movies and photos on it, and having a huge mirror is very useful for that type of workload. I could drive it with a cheap ARM device, which should allow me to stream a 4k video over the network, provided my network is the bottleneck.

So yeah, I'm very much interested in this device.

Why not just use an actual 2.5" SSD instead of a bunch of SD cards in a terrible quality adapter?

At least with the SSD, you only have one microcontroller doing god-knows-what to hide the horrific reality of flash storage, vs 10 SD card microcontrollers and one on the adapter board, which are all probably even worse.

Not just performance. Reliability and data loss are also bad. All of these adapters do raid-0, which means any one card failure (very common, I have seen it a lot in my personal devices) will damage the volume.

As I have a lot of odd SD cards unused in drawers I would be more interested in these adapters if they exposed every card as its own drive so I could do ZFS, or if they did "real" raid.

good lord he's unwatchable. skip to 7:00 for something somewhat real.

Yes, he is hard to watch and they have useful information in their reviews. It's hard.

There are extremely tiny and cheap micro sd card USB adapters, basically just the size of the card. Stay away from generic ones though. Lexar and SanDisk make good USB 3 compatible ones, and are quite reliable.

Don't get Kingston, like this one, they seem to break leaving half the thing inside the USB port way too often in my experience :

https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1XUlsJVXXXXcGXpXXq6xXFXXXG/Kin...

Thanks for the suggestion. But my intent was to create a 1TB flash storage device from a bunch of old flash I have lying around.

If you don't care about reliability or read/write speeds, sure.

But for just $218 USD you can have a brand new 1 TB USB 3.1 Portable SSD that does sequential reads/writes at 400 megabytes per second.

Trying to write a terabyte at two or even ten megabytes per second would be excruciating.

Trying to write a terabyte at two or even ten megabytes per second would be excruciating.

As noted above, this would be WORM

But for just $218 USD

I'd rather spend $218 on my family and re-use the flash I have lying around instead of dumping it in a landfill.

My experience with SanDisk has been mediocre. I've multiple microSD card failures in GoPros and RaspberryPis. Their microSD to SD adapters are the absolute worst and their cards, an only theirs, will continuously dismount and remount every 30 seconds or so if left idle in my laptop.

Sony has let me down as well, their cards have either poor or no wear leveling and will die in a matter of weeks when used in a GoPro. Every single one I bought has died inside of a year.

The longest lived microSD card I currently have is from Lexar and I recently bought some Samsung cards to see how they'll do.

Lexar recently changed hands, so it will be interesting to see if their reliability remains good.

My personal record is an 11 year old 1 GB Lexar that's even been thrown into the washing machine by mistake a couple times. Still in use. I find these things extremely resilient in general, no issues with SanDisk at all for me.

I refuse to buy SanDisk. Have had multiple microSD and USB flash drives from them that are permanently stuck as Read-Only. According to them, it is a common manufacturing error in their process.

The better-known brands like Sandisk and Sony have a ton of counterfeit clones in circulation. Some of the problems you are experiencing might well be due to that.

Lexar is a less-known brand, less likely to be used by counterfeiters.

> You can use 1 , 2 , 4 , 8 ,10 Micro SD Cards at one time. Do not support 3/5/7/9 Micro SD cards together.

I don't know why but I found this note in the description really amusing.

Odd number bad, unless you number 1!

And no mention of 6.

Because it's the number of the devil. Obviously. /s

Isn't that thing really really dangerous? It does use Raid 0 (ie, no redundancy) on one of the fastest wearing media out there. Unless I missed some recent development, SD cards are a lot more subject to wearing than SSD drives, therefore any use of them to build a disk with striping would be just crazy.

Love that this reply includes a link to exactly the device imagined for sale for $33.

In this case 10 mSD slots, single sided.

So you could have a slow $5000 10TB flash drive.

That is an impressively mad product.

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