Product Idea: USB Flash Drives

[barray]

That would be really neat!   For a USB 2.0 storage device, using quad-SPI flash should provide more than enough speed, and would allow rather easy implementation of different RAID levels, while keeping the price of device low.

Yeah, I think it's quite feasible using the QSPI interface you suggest - it even mentions supporting up to four slaves. That should be more that enough to begin tests. For full speed QSPI we may run into problems with signals, etc, but we'll run into that when we get there.

Is there enough documentation available for the BL602?

@lupyuen has done some epic work in this space: https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/book

I can't tell if he got QSPI working, but there is certainly more than enough to get going there.

What about the USB interface, required for exposing the storage to the host?  I cannot see that available in the BL602?

Me neither, we might be looking at USB-SPI interface chip initially: https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/D...22288A.pdf

We should in theory be using something with USB support already, but the BL602 is nice simply because the community already works on it and it has everything else we need, as well as being RISC-V. Developing hardware for the BL602 should be as simple as just developing a 'hat' PCB - which makes it quite attractive as a starting platform: https://files.pine64.org/doc/Pinenut/NUT...%201.0.pdf

On second thought, I agree with you.  There's no way to know in advance what's actually inside an off-the-shelf USB flash drive, regardless of the actual make and model, which invalidates the whole idea about "harvesting" the parts.

Not to mention how difficult some of those chips may be to solder without damaging them in some way.

Furthermore, no open storage device is easily and inexpensively available to pretty much anyone, which is the key, if you agree.  I wonder where and how could I buy one of the referenced OpenSSD development boards?  Even if buying those boards is actually possible, it would surely cost an arm and a leg, effectively rendering them unavailable.

I'm not sure you can buy them - and the added complexity overhead with all the crazy stuff it is able to do for the purpose of debugging.