Expresscard SSD Drive

Hey heyy! Just a few questions regarding an SSD drive that goes into the express card slot! Heres a link!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208324

FIRST and most importantly. I don't know ANYTHING about express card slots... does that thing fit in a Dell XPS m1330?

Secondly... if it does fit, does the Expresscard slot provide enough bandwidth to let the thing function as fast as a normal SSD drive. If not, how big if a hit am I taking?

THIRD... Is there anything I should know about these SSD drives before I buy em? I just wanna put all my Vista files in that thing so the machine boots up fast... But should I know about anything before I blow all that money?

Fourth... Is that a good price?

Thank you ladies and gentlemen! I appreciate the help.

 

Well, for one, you can't boot from them, so if that's all you want it for, scratch it.

Second, they are all USB based right now, none are actually PCI-E, so it's just a convenient form factor instead of a USB thumbdrive hanging off the side of the computer.

Read this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=132451

The Transcend that you linked above is faster on writes but it is still USB based (as the only way you can adapt an Expresscard to USB is when the card is USB to start - the PCI-E based ones can't apparently be adapted).

Third, yeah, it'll work in your computer. You have an Expresscard/54 slot which will take both 34mm and 54mm size cards (but only one at a time no matter the size).

Oh and one last thing, they only announced the 32GB one YESTERDAY so it's going to be really damned expensive right now.

 

Wellll if I can't boot from it... I really don't want it at all then... it's nothing more than a giant USB drive. Thanks for saving me muito dinhiero.

 

For info about Expresscard, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressCard

The M1330 has a 54 slot which will accept the Transcend SSD.

Regarding bandwith, Expresscard uses PCIe 1x which is slower than the SATA used by internal SSD drives. However, the drive itself will come nowhere near exceeding the speed of PCIe 1x. PCIe 1x will be 250Mbps (in one direction) while the SSD drive will only operate at maybe 67Mbps (based on Sandisk spec). Therefore the Expresscard slot is not the bottleneck.

If you are trying improve boot times using vista Readyboost, It would be much cheaper to buy a 2Gb SD card and leave it in the card reader. However, you may not even benefit from this if you already have 2Gb of ram. If you are trying to improve boot times by installing Vista on the SSD, you better check to see that your BIOS will allow booting from the expresscard.
The current benefit of having a SSD is to improve boot times and eliminate the mechanical drive from the notebook (improving battery life). However, they are slower when working with large files, and already having a mechanical drive in your notebook, you will not see the benefit of improved battery life.
If you leave Vista on the hard drive and place all your program files on the SSD, you may see an improvement in application load times (Google this to verify)

Is it a good price? thats for you to decide. SSD's are still very expensive being new technology. For the average person, they are not good value. But if you have the money to spend, value is irrelevant. I see no purpose in having a 32GB expresscard SSD, unless your HDD has run out of space or you really need to move around 32GB of files between laptops.

 

Thank you for the MASSIVE amount of information. I am going to catch up on all this reading you assigned me. =P

 

I will tell you what, as far as performance goes I was really jumping up and down when they started offering a 32GB SSD as an option on the Latitude D420 (but then they didn't offer it to the Federal EPP program). Anyways, there you were going from a 1.8" 4200RPM drive to an SSD. Huge difference in performance and given the D420 is an ultraportable, useful increase in battery life. In bigger books you're not going to care so much about battery life because you have bigger batteries. What you want is performance, in which case you'll be better served just getting a faster hard drive.

Someone on another thread was talking that the performance sweetspot is going to be a hybrid 7200RPM drive (but those don't exist yet for public consumption). In the meantime I am planning on doing what Toxic Banana has suggested with sticking a card in the card reader and leaving it there. I may not have a perceivable benefit since I will have 2GB of RAM (loving those free deals) but you never know.

 

When I have the expresscard ssd in the slot I cannot start windows vista. My windows files are on my internal hard drive (32 GB SSD) and when I remove the expresscard, my computer will boot normally. Anyone have a solution to this problem?

 

lester - does it work when you put the card in AFTER you boot?

 

Yes, it does work when I put the card in after I boot.

I resolved the problem. I went into the bios settings and removed "boot from usb flash drive" from the boot order. Now it boots vista without any problems.

This makes me think that you can bootup vista from one of these expresscards.

 

What happens if you lower the priority of the "boot from USB flash drive" (i.e. lower that below the actual hard drive). Does it still work?

 

Does anyone know if I can boot from the Lexar 16GB SSD? I have a project im working on, and it would be to have vista on my primary hard drive then OSX Leopard on my SSD, then just add it to the bootloader, I can confirm I got leopard installed on my m1330 everything working including audio and wifi, what does the SSD come up as in the bios do they consider it a USB drive or what?

 

I have a Lexar 8 GB expresscard in an HP 2133 mininote. The HD test shows 24 MB/s sequential read speed. I assume that means it is using PCIe-1x? and that USB 2 would be slower?