Ghetto SAN (USB Keys of Doom)

Having spent some time on the road last week at both the DC and Chicago VMUGs, I collected a number of USB keys from the various booths. Not wanting them to go to waste (most were >2GB) I threw them together in a small Nexenta Powered SAN.

GhettoSAN Setup

  1. Installed Nexenta in a VM under Fusion
  2. Mounted all the USB Keys:
    image
    image
  3. Created and shared a volume.
  4. Disabled compression & dedupe
  5. Ran IOMeter

GhettoSAN Performance

Here are the results of 6 runs of IOMeter at 5 minutes a piece. The results are curious:

Under 100% read:

image

Other Tests:

image

Summary

Well, I’d not recommend doing this in production in any way, shape, or form. However, it’s interesting to note, that in a RAID0 the keys performed quite well. (RAID 0 for ultimate redundancy!)

3 thoughts on “Ghetto SAN (USB Keys of Doom)

Comments are closed.