Writing to many USB Drives

I need the same thing for CompactFLASH cards. If you happen upon that in your search, could you send it? Thanks. -mpm

I have been researching for quite some time. There are some products on the market, but they are in the thousands of Dollars. I wish somebody comes up with a good and low-cost line. The market is there, the technology is not expensive. If I find something, I will write you. Please do the same.

That actually sounds quite inexpensive to me, given how small I'd imagine the market is.

The technology isn't, but paying for people to package it up and devliver it to you in low quantities is.

Is this just something you want to do for fun, or is it part of a commercial venture? In the case of the later, how you compared how much your product price will have to change for the various options of automated batch copying vs. just paying someone to sit in front of a PC with, say, 64 USB ports and lots of time on their hands?

But can you write to all 64 USBs simultaneously (or close enough so it looks simultaneous)?

Thanks, Rich

I would say it would be nearly impossible. I don't know of anything that isn't proprietary hardware and software driven that would write to that many drives. Most I've seen was in a Sun Enterprise 450 server that had 20 SCSI drives but there again, proprietary hardware and software, not just a bunch of USB drives.

Mmm... perhaps not. But I bet you could do 8, and cheap PCs are only what... ~$250/ea? 8 input KVM, 8 PCs, 64 USB ports... go to town!

Just get a whole stack of USB 2.0 hubs, and a simple program which copies files to all connected drives.

Cheers, Nicholas Sherlock

Each usb hub can only transmit to a single device at a time, many pcs only have one or root hubs, so cascading hubs won't improve throughput much

Bye. Jasen

Thank you. I think this is the way for me. I now have to find the program, or find the person to write the program.

T.I.

That is OK, because these drives are slow. So, the bottle neck is not the hub, nor the usb, but the drives.

"Talal Itani" wrote in news:mvWei.1344$yp.699@trnddc08:

Simple shell script.

Operator inserts drive. System detects drive., calling file copy script.File copy script detects presense of certian file, if present leave, if absent, copy and then "eject" drive.

Computer Associates is supplying some of their software on USB modules, so they have to have a way to program them.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Say Michael,

Since you deal with a lot of machines that use freeware, what's your favorite free anti-virus program? I've only used AVG, and it seems OK, but I suspect you might have had more time to try out and evaluate some of the other options out there.

---Joel

Couldn't find a link to a free version of AVG the last time I looked at their Web Site.

Robert

Try this:

... it worked for me something like three weeks ago.

If only there was some kind of magic interweb searching machine! :)

--

John Devereux

No kidding? Fancy that.

*I* just searched on grisoft, where AVG comes from, and spent a bit of time at: poking around without finding any link to the free version.

Robert

Thanks. That works. Spent quite a bit of time poking around the AVG main site:

without finding such a link.

Robert

The best free (free, not freeware) anti-virus program is clamav

or the windows version from It is not an on-access scanner, so it needs a little discipline if you are a high-risk windows user - but on the other hand, it does not slow your PC with useless repeated checking of uninfected files. Use it to check your incoming email, and to scan downloaded files before running them, and perhaps for scheduled overnight scans of your programs.