By Andrew Liszewski
It’s a common practice to link several hard drives together in a RAID configuration. Not only do you end up with a larger single drive on your system but it can also allow faster read and write speeds since your data is being accessed on multiple drives at once. This always made me wonder if the same thing could be achieved with a bunch of USB flash drives hooked together and it seems I wasn’t the only one.
Designer Vicky Wei has actually made some 3D mockups of her Memory Infinite USB Storage concept. The drives have a USB male connector on one end and a female connector at the other allowing multiple drives to be connected together in an “add up” concept. You’ll still only see a single USB drive on your system but the storage space will increase with the addition of each drive. The Memory Infinite concept was originally conceived to deal with the fact that as larger and cheaper drives come on the market the smaller ones end up not being used anymore. By simply adding new drives to the chain you can take advantage of the storage space of both the old and new drives at once.
Unfortunately as far as I know this functionality is not part of the current USB specifications so perhaps we’ll have to wait for the release of USB 3.0 before something like this is possible?
[ Memory Infinite – USB Storage @ Yanko Design ] VIA [ Sci Fi Tech ]