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(Somewhat) Cheap solution to SSD drives?

post #1 of 3
2/3/08 at 5:13pm
Thread Starter 
http://www.lexar.com/ssd/expresscard.html

Lexar made a SSD with the form factor of an express card.

"The ExpressCard has a maximum throughput of 2.5 Gbit/s through PCI Express and 480 Mbit/s through USB 2.0 dedicated for each slot." - Wikipedia

A lot of Laptops use Serial ATA, which has a 3.0 Gbit/s rate, but most hard drives can barely output 1.5 Gbit/s, so the express card effectively has just as high an output (if connected through PCI Express) as a SATA drive.

So for roughly $200 (including shipping and maybe tax), you can get a 16gb SSD that fits in your express card slot (seriously, what uses the express card slot anyway? besides external sound cards I guess).

16gb is MORE than enough to store your OS of choice, and would delegate the primary HD to a storage role. Laptops would get all the benefits of a standard SSD, such as faster boot times and increased battery life.

Questions I have:
Is the Lexar SSD able to handle a lot of read/writes (like a real SSD as opposed to a standard flash "thumb drive")?
How do you find out if your express card slot is PCI-E or USB2.0?
Can the Lexar SSD use the full throughput of the ExpressCard/PCI-E?
And most importantly, can you boot off of the ExpressCard slot?


If anyone has tried this or has the answers, pleeeease let me know!
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post #2 of 3
2/4/08 at 1:14am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Koshinn View Post
Laptops would get all the benefits of a standard SSD, such as faster boot times and increased battery life.
AFAIK, most laptops are not capable of booting from an express card. The laptop BIOS would have to support it, and different manufacturers code their BIOS's differently for each of their models depending upon what hardware they want to support for that model.

I suspect battery life would not improve significantly unless the internal HD were removed, especially if you run Vista since Vista frequently operates your drives to optimize search time and application performance.

Quote:
Questions I have:
Is the Lexar SSD able to handle a lot of read/writes (like a real SSD as opposed to a standard flash "thumb drive")?
Yes, even better than regular HD's. In fact modern flash drives are also capable of handling mutiple r/w cycles as their integrated controllers employ write leveling algorithms to make complete use of the media.

Quote:
How do you find out if your express card slot is PCI-E or USB2.0?
Express card uses PCI-E and is independent of USB, perhaps your reference was for express cards with USB 2.0 ports on them...

Quote:
Can the Lexar SSD use the full throughput of the ExpressCard/PCI-E?
I don't see why not; as you pointed out, there is plenty of bandwidth available.
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post #3 of 3
2/4/08 at 2:00am
I wouldn't call that cheap if comparing to apple's $1000 64 GB offering. ~$12-15 per GB ratio and that is with consideration for apple's high profit margin. However, newegg had a 32GB compact flash card for $134; slightly different technology but much more reasonable price/storage.
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