miniPCI sd card raid5 for laptop - i know it's stupid, but HOW stupid?

[sth]

xpost from GH because timezone and also more nerds here....

ok, in the spirit of totally-unnecessary-but-cool-in-a-useless-nerdy-way (what's the german word for THAT 7bit? ) projects, here me out:

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?

[Plasmodium]

Is there such a thing as a mini PCIE SD card reader?
Also, if I understand correctly, there is a difference between mini-PCIE slots for wireless etc and for storage. For example, you can physically fit a mini PCIE SSD into a wireless card slot, but it isn't electronically compatible.

Also, what laptop is it with that many spare PCIE slots?

[sth]

Is there such a thing as a mini PCIE SD card reader?
Also, if I understand correctly, there is a difference between mini-PCIE slots for wireless etc and for storage. For example, you can physically fit a mini PCIE SSD into a wireless card slot, but it isn't electronically compatible.

Also, what laptop is it with that many spare PCIE slots?

good point re: wireless/stoarge, might have to look into that. however, minipci microSD readers are not SSDs, they present themselves as mass storage devices, so it might be ok. definitely not talking about the dell mini-style SSDs that fit into pcie slots, or mSATA.

it's an x301. if it is configured how i think it is, it should have 3 minipci altogether with one being taken up by the wireless card. that leaves one for a wwan card and one for wireless usb.

this whole project depends on that so we'll see. i'm not buying parts til i have the laptop in my hands

http://www.mfactors.com/products/MR15-2 ... apter.html

[Plasmodium]

it's an x301.

Thinkpad?

Yes, I wasn't saying that the card readers were SSDs, per se, but part of me thought they might use the same format as them. No real reason for thinking that though, tbh.

I've never seen those internal mini-pci SD card readers before. What is the real advantage of that?

The other thing I guess is whether the laptop would support RAIDing SD cards (or RAID full stop) in the software (BIOS or whatever).

[scottc]

I just snagged an x301 too! I'm so excited. Have you dug out the DVD drive and replaced it with another SSD yet? So many possibilities.

[Halvar]

I've seen this done with usb sticks, and the results weren't too bad actually.

Like this eg.:
https://fstoppers.com/product/convert-u ... -ssd-12299

[sth]

I've seen this done with usb sticks, and the results weren't too bad actually.

Like this eg.:
https://fstoppers.com/product/convert-u ... -ssd-12299

beautiful.

i have some spare 8GB microSDs laying around, so if i can find a good deal on dual microSD miniPCI cards i might just give this a shot, pending whether my x301 has enough free ports. wouldn't be worth it with just two microSDs but with 4, we can do some real grilling.

[andrewjoy]

You should be able to do with it with ZFS.

ZFS does not give 2 shits about where the data is stored and what on .

And you have all the added benefits of a file system that was developed for a modern system , and not something terribly out of date like NTFS or HFS+

[gogusrl]

If I manage to stop spending money on keyboards, a ZFS based file server is next on my list. Unfortunately those hdd prices make me rage more than the Skidata+ gb

[andrewjoy]

I will post pictures of my ZFS based server ( i call her COBOL in memory of blackbettymy old computer, now replaced with blackbetty_v2) at some point if your interested. Its offline at the moment as the PSU has some insane transformer squeal and i don't want to fry 16TB of disks.

[Madhias]

Mhmm, ZFS. I'd like to have a filestore with ZFS at home, but I don't know how to do it best. It should be small & silent. What do you guys plan there to do? A normal PC? A HP mini server? An old fileserver stolen from work?

[Plasmodium]

Mine's pretty unambitious (pretty much stock OMV samba shares), but it's a 2002 Compaq Deskpro EN that my boss was chucking out at work (he got it when another company which was chucking it out years before). It's built like a tank, really quiet and reliable. But...not very powerful at all.

[DanielT]

Mhmm, ZFS. I'd like to have a filestore with ZFS at home, but I don't know how to do it best. It should be small & silent. What do you guys plan there to do? A normal PC? A HP mini server? An old fileserver stolen from work?

I have built my own NAS with ZFS, I have used Solaris 11 because the ZFS implementation in Linux is utter crap. The BSD port of ZFS is also very good. For my NAS I have used an old HP SFF desktop with Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM, I chose a model that was small and silent enough but had enough space for 3 disks one was installed in the CD-ROM slot.
I have 2 2TB disks and one 80GB for the OS, but I think I will replace it with an USB stick to save power and space.
ZFS is so cool I don't know where to start, you can make samba shares, NFS, iscsi, you have RAID, snapshots ...
I my set-up I had one active disk, the other one was used as a backup, data is synched every night and on the backup disk I have also snapshots for the 30 days, if a file is deleted by mistake I can recover it very easy.
You don't need a super power horse for something like this, just a decent computer and very good disks.
I have in plan to buy a second ethernet card and build an aggregate to for more bandwidth.
I have used Solaris 11 because I like it and has the best ZFS support and has also some cool network virtualization options, I can have also zone running with a small webserver and stuff like that.
BSD work also very good, or something like OpenNAS/FreeNAS .
I still don't recommend ZFS on linux, it's implemented like crap nothing like the original stuff.
If anyone wants some tips and tricks on ZFS feel free to ask

P.S: I would love a HP Microserver for my stuff that would make things way cooler But an older decent box does the job just right.

[Daniel]

Remembers me of that old ZFS video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zw8V8g5eT0

There's also an English dubbed version: https://vimeo.com/16433418

[gogusrl]

i5-2520m, 16gb ram, just waiting for some $$ to buy the hdds (if I manage to stop spending it on keyboards). Still haven't decided between freenas / nas4free and whatever else is out there for ZFS.

[DanielT]

whatever you chose don't use Linux for ZFS, on Linix btrfs works better but it's still green behind the ears.
I don't like fancy stuff like nas complete solutions, I prefer to have something vanilla and build it the way I want it.