DIY SSD made of SD Cards! - YouTube

Okay so today's video yeah it's a product that really

makes no

sense to me at least on the surface this right here is i've actually got the product page up behind me this is come on come on get in here

check this out check this up this is the i don't know highland star

microelectronic

anyway we ordered it from usb dot brando dot-com

and this doodad right here adapts as

as regular sata interface with some controller from sage that i've never heard of to 10 micro sd slots

That's quality right there so yes my friends today we're gonna make our own ssd

[LTT Theme] {click click}

[Intro] Song: Lazlo Supernova

Today's videos brought to you by tunnel bear the simple VPN try Tunnel bear for free at tunnelbear.com/LTT

we're gonna have that linked below

So step one is gonna be some RATFAM because

while it does seem fairly straightforward in principle you take the 10

micro sd cards that Kingston graciously sent you because you're a famous youtuber and then you

Install them in all the things i do want to make sure that we are doing it correctly

so instructional note number the first you can use 1 2 4 8 or

10 micro sd cards at one time it does not support 3 5 7 or 9

Instructional step number ii insert the micro sd cards into the micro sd slots one by one as

The order shown on adapter where's the

CHP0L I just see COM tf 1 tf 6 tf 2 i think that's for trans flash

why does this pcb say demo on it

okay well

We're just gonna we're just gonna go according, to the numbers so where's here's tf 1 let's do this thing wait doing this write

Down and then you slide it there we go

So the idea here is that it runs all of your micro SD cards which

aside from being a much lower grade typically than the nand flash that you would find in an ssd

are

fundamentally the same thing it runs them all in RAID 0

To make up for the fact that a typical micro SD card will be capable of anywhere from you know 20 to

maybe 80 to 90 megabytes a second reads and writes whereas a typical

SSD especially a SATA 3 one can saturate a SATA 3 interface at around you know 500

Mm 50 or so megabytes per second

One problem that i do foresee though is that there's more

To life than sequential performance when it comes to

SSD

and the controller dictates what the random performance will be like and

oh

That too ignores the other problem which is that the flash on a typical microsd card is not only slower

But also less resilient than the higher quality stuff on a normal SSD a problem that is

compounded this is all about the problems with this thing hey

Compounded by the fact that you're running this whole thing in RAID 0 so one dead micro SD card means

there goes your data it's gone, so there it is for better or for worse this is now a

1.2

terabyte RAID 0

micro SD

SATA SSD I don't know what it is let's plug it in this is so dumb it's like cool but it's like

why

there it is

no way

1.16 terabytes of useable space let's call this

drive letter k

has it special

So i'm actually a bit of a loss

now because i'm gonna let you guys behind the curtain for a second here while i was prepping this video i actually

realized that this probably wasn't going to work

because i hadn't gone through the instructions

ahead of time and i just noticed that it says right here

do not support uhs-1 and

these are quite clearly

uhs-1, cards

so i

Was expecting to like go on a field trip to best buy and come back?

But it's working so let's let's test it i guess ok, so if i told you we have the world's stupidest ssd

special k drive here how would you benchmark it it's 10 micro sd cards on a pcb

we could use crystaldiskmark, ATTO disk benchmark

i'm coming into this with

literally no expectations whatsoever

actually at 512-byte that's right even that bad is it

this is that a queue depth of eight though so to be clear this is very unrealistic for a desktop workload

okay

So there's a couple of takeaways here number one is that our drive is indeed sata to 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 let's head it with crystal disk mark just for lulz oh

wow um

we're still gonna run the pass mark test i guess but this is not looking good for random performance this is performing

about like you'd expect from a bad SSD four or five years ago because there's a lot more

To SSD performance than just

taking a bunch of nand flash and

writing to and reading from it in a

Parallelized manner to get more speed out of it the controller intelligence has to be high in order to get

better oh, wow these random numbers these are awful

okay

So for our last trick

pass mark just 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 when it spikes

That's what most modern SSDs are really trying

To overcome this those spikes and latency that's when you like click on something and you feel like your computer's like?

So we are seeing spikes up to almost half a second on this drive

with a lot of them actually sitting here around a fifth of a second so

while you could

run an os on this thing i

really wouldn't recommend it and to drive that point home

i've actually spent the last half an hour

waiting for windows to install off a usb drive and it's still at

81% of getting files ready for installation

this thing is kind of painfully slow like to the point where i'm having a really hard time figuring out what

its purpose could possibly be because you might go oh well you know maybe

Disposable data that you need to be faster than a hard drive?

But not as fast as an SSD like a steam game library but even then the cost is so high

to fill this thing with 64 gig 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

And it's cool

So there it is

and you know what else is cool Dollar Shave Club if you have it for whatever reason signed up for Dollar Shave Club

then now is a better time than ever for just five bucks they are offering their

shave shower starter set it includes their executive razor as well as three trial size versions of some of their most

popular products their body wash their shave butter and their one wipe charlies butt wipes

After the starter set replacement cartridges are just a few bucks a month's so head over to

dollarshaveclub.com slash lightest we're gonna have that link below and join the club

so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe

consider checking out where to buy the

maybe not that this thing but maybe the SD cards and and that site actually where we got this has lots of other cool random

gadgets as well so you can check that out at the link in the video description

also linked down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join