4 Micro SD to Micro SATA Adapter RAID to 1.8 Inch Micro SATA Converter

[Bonebreaker777]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/4-Micro-SD...item3cd07092c0

Looks well curious. Wonder if such device would be able to go against fully fledged SSDs, either in price/performance ratio or performance. So far I couldn't find a review for it.

[watercooled]

I doubt it would come close to the performance of a real SSD - SD cards use slower, higher level MLC NAND, and far less powerful controllers. Add to the lack of features like garbage collection and TRIM and performance will get worse over time if used like an SSD. And you wouldn't know where you stand in terms of reliability, write endurance.

SD cards are really intended for things like media storage, not the type of workload created by a desktop operating system. And I'd be surprised if the controller of that device was remotely high performance either.

[Agent]

The random read/write / IOPS are terrible on even the 'fast' SD cards compared to a SSD. They're designed for sequential reading and writing, not access speed.

Some benchmarks here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...-i,2940-9.html

[mikerr]

SD cards are really intended for things like media storage, not the type of workload created by a desktop operating system.

As owners of raspberry Pi will tell you, many cards are designed for digital camera activity (large sequential writes) at the expensive of random r/w performance.
(the difference between one card and another over 100x on random writes, with a class 4 card often better than class 10)

[watercooled]

The class only takes sequential performance into account, which as you say is important for being able to keep up with writes created by digital (especially video) cameras.

There are a few SD cards aimed more at smartphones, with a bit more attention paid to random IO, but still they're miles off being comparable to SSD performance.

The poor performance is one reason given for the lack of uSD slots on a lot of phones (or the advisory note against using them) - they can potentially seriously impact performance for certain apps, and the manufacturers probably don't want that to harm the reputation of their products. On-board storage generally performs far better.

[Bonebreaker777]

Ahh :-( looked interesting. Too bad. Thanks anyway for the explanation.