should i try a raid5 on my laptop using SD cards? what else to do with minipci??

[sth]

i had a super stupid  idea that might actually work. im getting a laptop with maybe 2 free minipci slots and i was thinking (just for "FUN", what a riot) that i could get a couple of mPCI dual SD card readers and 4 SD cards, then make a raid5 array out of it to increase the storage.

how stupid is this? it's probably a waste of money but i honestly don't know what else to do with the extra minipci slots. it already has wifi and BT and i dont need wwan (or BT for that matter but it's onboard already afaik).

otherwise, what else could i do to use up those slots? what's the deal with minipci memory expansions?

[suicidal_orange]

Netbooks and sub-miniature notebooks use minipci SSDs as hard drives, pretty sure these would be more reliable than SD cards but a raid5 would be much more fun as you say.  Obviously you wouldn't have a hardware raid controller but sounds like a nice laptop with some unused CPU cycles.

Also you realise raid5 will only give you the capacity of three cards, with the fourth being used for data redundancy?  A raid0 stripe theoretically gives you more speed and capacity with less processor overhead, but one dead card means bye-bye data.  Also how good are the dual SD adapters?  Do they support sleep or will they drain your battery?

The only other use I know of for minipci is GPS if that's of any interest?

[sth]

Also you realise raid5 will only give you the capacity of three cards, with the fourth being used for data redundancy?  A raid0 stripe theoretically gives you more speed and capacity with less processor overhead, but one dead card means bye-bye data.  Also how good are the dual SD adapters?  Do they support sleep or will they drain your battery?

good points. raid5 is probably good enough, this would most likely be mounted as /home/sth/music and read from much more often than write. i should definitely look into sleeping it though.

The only other use I know of for minipci is GPS if that's of any interest?

probably not but i was also thinking about a radio card just for fun.

[sth]

From my little bit of research it looks like the power draw might be more directly related to the SD cards themselves -- as long as i got 'nice' cards (sandisk or something) it should hopefully reduce draw once its done with r/w.

getting cards that i KNOW work well is another matter entirely