This question seems to be one of those ones that's either an awesome idea or completely moronic. I've played around with linux a fair bit, but don't consider myself at all an expert, so don't be surprised if its the latter.

Anyway, this is my situation. I'm ordering myself a tablet PC (Fujitsu T4220), and am going to install linux (probably Ubuntu) on it. I want good battery life, so I'm trying to do everything I can to maximize it. From the research I've done, one of the primary battery users is the hard drive. Now, I'm going to have 2GB of RAM, so hopefully I shouldn't need the swapfile all that much. But when I do, its going to use up my battery. So I researched ideas to minimize this impact. First I came upon the idea of putting the swapfile in a ramdisk. However, from what I've read this is generally not recommended. Then I had the idea of putting it on a usb stick (similar to vista's ReadyBoost). However, the slow transfer speeds (especially write speed) of usb sticks kind of bother me.

So, the idea I had to maximize my transfer speeds was to buy three 2GB usb sticks (there are 3 usb ports on the T4220) and make a RAID 0 out of them, and put the swapfile on that. I'd probably split it, with half of the total 6GB to the swapfile and half to frequently accessed data. The only article I could find on a usb stick RAID was an old (2005) one, but that led me to believe it is in fact possible to make a usb stick raid. However, I'm still not entirely sure, and have no idea as to the effect on battery or performance. So if anyone could enlighten me as to that, and to whether this is in general an awesome/moronic idea, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Edit: Oh, an I'm also not entirely sure that this is the right section, so if it isn't please move the topic.

1. With 2 GB you do not need swap.
2. USB sticks have limited number of writes, you are going to "wear them out" fast if you really swap on them.
I'd create a small (say 512 MB or even less) swap partition and turn it off by default.

Using USB for data transactions is not smart because it will stall other USB devices. IEEE-1394 or firewire is a lot better data transaction. USB is meant to be used with very low-speed devices like keyboard, mouse, tablet, and other devices.

Setting up RAID-0 (stripping) with flash cards is ok, but only if you are willing to create the device that will hold all the cards and circuitry to protect the cards from power loss and data corruption using ECC.

Go to bitmicro.com and read through their solid-state hard drives. Bitmicro has better SSD than other SSD manufactures because they supply SSD to government and to companies that make devices to handle harsh environments. Other SSD manufactures are cheap but they do not have hardware to resist abrupt power loss, ECC, cell age detection. However, they cost several thousand US dollars.

BTW, I am not selling Bitmicro. I came across their site several years ago.