This adapter from looks like an interesting solution to replace or create more storage for a computer that uses 2.5 inch SATA hard drives. It’s a micro SD to SATA 22-pin converter card card that has been designed to use up to 10 micro SD cards. Once installed, it appears as an ordinary SATA hard drive to DOS, Windows 3.1, NT4, 98SE, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, Mac, and Linux operating systems and can be configured as a bootable drive. Note that you will need to use 1, 2, 4, 8 or 10 micro SD cards at one time as it will not support an odd number of cards like 3, 5, 7 or 9 micro SD cards. Also, when you use different capacity micro SD cards in RAID mode, the total capacity of the drive will be the smaller capacity of micro SD card multiplied by the number of micro SD cards. The adapter is priced at $24.99 from Amazon.
Gadgeteer Comment Policy - Please read before commenting
I can only see support for Raid 0 on the site. That means Striping only. No data redundancy. A failure on any of the micro cards will cause loss of data across entire card. Keep this in mind if you are going to rely on it for critical documents. The upside is with 10 cards, the potential speed can be quite high. This is often a nice trade off, if you want extreme speed and a failure of drive will not hurt you. This could be scratch drive for video editing, install games on it for fast load times (keep your saved games backed up).
But then again, you arn’t going to find a good quality RAID 1/5/6/10 card for $35
This is (for my part) what i think after what i see (i did not buy one).
I think if one microSD fails some data will get lost, but not all, from what i can see and think, the Raid 0 is not a 10x Raid 0.
Seeing a little deep i see there are “pairs” Low & High.
So i can asume it will do five Raid 0 sets, and over that a BIG Raid (concatenate).
If it realy could do N x Raid 0, what is the reason for multiple of two? raid 0 can be done with 2, 3, 4, 5 , etc.
I think it is really doing a full disk composed of: Raid 0 (0 & 1) – Raid 0 (2 & 3) – Raid 0 (4 & 5) – Raid 0 (6 & 7) – Raid 0 (8 & 9).
That is the main reason i do not buy it… i am looking for a real 10 x Raid 0, so with class 10 microSD a speed of 100MiB/s minimum.
If i am rigth this card will do a no much more than 20MiB/s (using on all slots a class 10 microSD card).
You obviously have absolutely zero clue how an RAID0 would function.
10 drives doing 10x RAID0, would be 10 logical drives for the windows, the same as individual drives.
RAID0 across 10 drives would be single logical drive to the OS & FS, and loss of a single drive (MicroSD here) would mean total loss of data.
Just to clarify. As I think the 10x was ment to be a reference to the class, and not raid config.
RAID0 across 10 drives would be ONE logical drive. RAID0 is a striped volume and allows for very fast access and performance. The drawback is yes a single drive failure will undoubtebly cause a loss of all data (without resorting to expensive recovery efforts). This is not nessicarally a bad thing, there are instances where very fast IO is needed, be it for cache drives, scatch space, temp state info, etc where a loss of data would have no lasting impact.
However this is old tech, and the limit in performance would be in the BUS IO not the SD cards, the argument is accademic at this point for this product, but still does hold true in very specific cases.
PSA: this is not ment as a troll or anything, just to help others who might be confused.
I might get one to do something with this draw full of 8gb cards.
Memory cell technology used to create SD cards does not have the durability to make critical use of something like this.
Even if you give a conservative life of a year for an SD card being written to continuously before a failure you have 10 cards and their individual MTBF so it’s kind of a crapshoot.
I agree with Andrew that this is probably only good for a scratch drive or some sort of cache which could be a pretty advantage. I wouldn’t use it for anything important.
If you’re willing to install this kind of converter, search ebay and find similar ones. 21~23 bucks.
Quite useless, in my opinion. Even if you disregard the fact that a real SSD has lots of data-safety stuff going on, which an SD card does not, even then this is not worth the money.
Let’s assume you want to create a 256 GB drive. You’d need 4 SD cards of 64 GB, which cost around $20, so that makes $80. Add the $32 for the adapter, and the total adds up to $112. A real 256 GB SSD will cost you about $100-110. And that SSD is a lot faster and safer.
I imagine this would likely be for people who already have a stack of card lying around. This gives the cards a new lease of life. I must have 30 or so SD cards lying around of all different sizes but most commonly 8GB ones so I could get a 80GB drive going on here for $30 odd bucks. Not too bad at all!
haha or how about now? where 1TB is 7$… i really want to do this…. but ya idk about life span..
being a novice and not as tech savvy as most of the folks here, but after reading all the comments and tryouts I would lean to agree with ‘yeppers’… its not worth the money for anything important or critical, but if you have a bunch of SD cards laying around in a drawer or whatever being useless, this might weigh in as a good option for getting some new use out of those as a fast cache or something of that sort which would make it a practical item to keep around for such uses…but def not for anything vital you can’t lose…for that best to stick with the real SSD with all of its features.
This is a review of 5 years old, so that is, like, ancient in computer land. This product (and the likes) is not available anymore.
Well, if you can tweak it, you could turn the thing into a RAID 1 + 0, in which you have both striping and mirroring.
well i was thinking as long as the board took care of the raid 0 you you could get 2 the ‘sata’ cards and maybe raid 1 in bios.
I tried to connect 2 in the same box, and the BIOS will only see one. This does not appear to scale well at all.
That setup makes no sense when you can have 10.
Using your pricing, 10x 64GB = 640GB at 232$, still not a good deal but cheaper than most actual SSDs.
When I thought about creating this same idea back in 2014 I thought of it as an expandable hard drive because back then microSD cards were not cheap and I only could have afforded 1 or 2 at a time and SSD were not commonly used and not at all available as far as my pocket could see . Sadly I never built it myself. I confided with Invent Tech and heard nothing back from them but now I know that it may not have been a great idea for reasons I never dreamed of.
Where can someone buy this???
Through Brando. It’s linked in the post…
anyone know what them maximum size is for a mic sd on this? 32? 64? 128gb?
think i want to give it a go for the lolz
Currently 128g/card, and I kinda want one.
ive tried 2 of the cards cant get ether working with 10x 64gb and 1 x 32gb on its own. tried via usb caddy and sata on mobo. im £300 in whole unless i can get working.
Terrible product. Most of the SD cards will have it’s write cycles maxed out in a couple of months and you will be stuck with a read-only drive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2jKKFUnycA