So I went to Walmart and purchased 5 USB flash drives. I have 4 64gb drives and one 128 drive. (not pictured) They are all USB3 sandisk drives and they perform surprisingly well. It isn’t going to compete with proper storage any time soon but for small data it works perfectly fine. The reason that I went with the Sandisk drives is that I have a 5 year old flash drive that is still working great even though I have abused heavily. Sandisk drives are designed to flip to read only mode when they fail so they should be fine for data protection. I was a little concerned they they don’t have smart but I don’t think that is much of an issue.
Eventually I am going to do a proper benchmark of the cluster but for now I tested it with a simple backup. I got speeds ranging from 200mb/s to 20 mb/s for writes. It seemed to average around 50mb/s for writes although it jumped around quite a bit.
This might be good for learning how to setup ceph, but in now way should this be used for anything important.
Is it really that bad? I was going to use it for shared storage between my VMs. I have an external backup system in case it all implodes but I it seems like it is reasonably stable. I am not going to have a lot of data so the demand on the cluster is fairly low. I figure that as long as the total data is relatively small recovery shouldn’t be an issue since it can rebalance within a reasonable time period. I could always add proper drives down the road if I needed to since USB3 drive adapters are pretty affordable.
I would never recommend using flash drives to do anything more than to move a few files from one PC to another. Yes it really is that bad. You are going to be looking for a rough time when that fails. What you have right now is a ticking time bomb.
I don’t mind a time bomb since I can always start over if necessary. I am only using this for my personal stuff so if it explodes I can always redo my stuff and restore from backup. What I am curious about is how this will explode. I guess I will have to wait and see. I like playing with this kind of stuff and it is bonus if I learn something. Ideally I would like to try to keep this running as long as possible for no other reason than because I can.
Go for it man! You’re obviously are aware of the pitfalls and it sounds like you’re using data that is backed up and/or ‘safe’ for testing purposes.
Call me selfish if you will, but my only ask would be that you keep us posted on how things go with this over time with regular usage. I’m honestly curious!
@xMAXIMUSx is absolutely right about the risks with this. I would never recommend this as a solution to anything. But if you’re okay with investing the time, and the USB flash drives, I’d love to see how this turns out, and to see how ceph itself ‘feels’ about it.
