Chaining USB drives
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Chaining USB drives
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Chaining USB drives
#2What a simple/awesome idea... I'm surprised nobody else has thought of this before!
Re: Chaining USB drives
#3What a simple/awesome idea... I'm surprised nobody else has thought of this before!
For it to work, each of the drives would have to be both a mass storage device and a USB hub. Can USB hubs be this small? If each segment has to be 3 inches long to accomodate the dual functionality, a foot long chain of USB drives sticking out the side of your laptop is a bit less elegant than the concept.
Re: Chaining USB drives
#4What a simple/awesome idea... I'm surprised nobody else has thought of this before!
For it to work, each of the drives would have to be both a mass storage device and a USB hub. Can USB hubs be this small? If each segment has to be 3 inches long to accomodate the dual functionality, a foot long chain of USB drives sticking out the side of your laptop is a bit less elegant than the concept.
There's also the problem of power. I doubt these devices could be usb spec compliant since what is essentially happening here is an endless chain of bus powered usb hubs.
It is pretty though.
Re: Chaining USB drives
#5What a simple/awesome idea... I'm surprised nobody else has thought of this before!
For it to work, each of the drives would have to be both a mass storage device and a USB hub. Can USB hubs be this small? If each segment has to be 3 inches long to accomodate the dual functionality, a foot long chain of USB drives sticking out the side of your laptop is a bit less elegant than the concept.
I don't think size would be much of an issue. Random googling finds USB2512[1] which comes in a 6mm x 6mm QFN package. It needs a crystal and a few caps. There's probably an equally tiny flash + USB SoC around to bolt onto it.
The hard part would be the board layout (USB2 requires some line impedance matching, afaik) and the actual packaging.
I reckon you could (conservatively) fit the necessary circuitry into 1 or 2 microSD sized cuboids, maybe one above the plug/socket, and one below. Maybe even less if you eschew some of the spec and only support daisy-chaining your own devices.
Re: Chaining USB drives
#6What a simple/awesome idea... I'm surprised nobody else has thought of this before!
I remember seeing something similar to this before. After a quick google search, turns out it's by the same people actually[1].
[1]: http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/03/22/running-out-of-usb-por...
Re: Chaining USB drives
#7Is that a terabyte, or are you just happy to see me?
Re: Chaining USB drives
#8How would files on different segments be presented to the OS? Would the directories on each disk be merged together into one root directory, would each one get its own directory, or something else? To make the "just pull out the one with the vacation photos on it" use-case work, you would have to be able to see and control which segment a given file is on.
Re: Chaining USB drives
#9What a simple/awesome idea... I'm surprised nobody else has thought of this before!
No one has thought of it before because it's not that useful.
If I want to plug multiple drives in, I just do. There is no reason I need to plug them into each other.
Whoever made it probably imagined that the drives would share a filesystem (i.e. one drive letter for all of them) - but did not think it through since doing that is too complicated to be practical.
Re: Chaining USB drives
#10How would files on different segments be presented to the OS? Would the directories on each disk be merged together into one root directory, would each one get its own directory, or something else? To make the "just pull out the one with the vacation photos on it" use-case work, you would have to be able to see and control which segment a given file is on.
I would assume that each module shows up as its own drive.