If you tend to hoard your old PC parts with the hopes of one day cannibalizing them and producing something great, then this project might get the creative juices flowing. It is a DIY Solid State Disk (SSD) that uses a USB hub and a bunch of memory sticks to create a kind of slapped together SSD drive housed in an old floppy disk drive, using RAID software to bundle all of the disks together to create one larger image.

It is less complicated than it sounds.

The equipment list as stated on the instructable is as follows:

4 x PQI 2GB USB Sticks (larger or smaller capacities would work fine).
1 x 4 Port USB Hub
1 x old 3.5″ floppy drive
1 x 3ft USB cable
4 x rubber or felt feet (optional)

A small pair of wire cutters
A small Phillips screwdriver
Elmers (or hot melt) glue

My recommendation for a build like this would be to try it out using the cheapest components that you can find. But be smart, where I am at least, memory tends to hit a certain minimum and stay there, regardless of the amount that larger capacity units sell for. I actually found that 2GB drives were selling for roughly the same amount as 1GB drives and there was only a small price hike to get to 4GB.

All up, at Japanese prices, if you make this build with 1GB drives you should be able to pull it off for around $40 (including the USB hub). Less if you have bits and pieces lying around. Using 2GB drives would only add about $5 to the total and you would be paying about $50 to build this thing out of 4GB drives. Once the sizes get bigger than 4GB though, the prices increase quite a bit.

I like the idea of housing the unit in an FDD. If you have sensitive files, are the super paranoid type or just don’t want your significant other to see your video collection then this is an easy way to do it.

What I really love about this project, however, is the utilitarian aspect of it. Most of us have an old desktop with a floppy drive that we don’t use, and a lot of the parts can be scrounged from the old junk that everyone tends to accumulate. So the only real expense is in the form of the flash drives which get cheaper every day.

Zim the builder on Instructables claims that the whole project took a couple of hours. It looks a great way to kill a bit of spare time on the weekend and to build something functional that you can get a lot of use of, it is also a pretty inexpensive way to learn about setting up software based RAID configurations. All in all, it is a very worthy project, which anyone who can squeeze a tube of glue has the capacity to pull off. [Instructables via MAKE]

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