SSD Express Card Slot

I have the Dell Studio 14z... I want to make use of my Express Card Slot.. Will I get any peformance boost by installing my OS to the following card:

http://www.amazon.com/Transcend-32G...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1246996774&sr=8-1



http://www.amazon.com/Transcend-32GB-ExpressCard-SSD-MLC/dp/B000SK9DLY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1246996774&sr=8-1

What are these cards good for?

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

 

I believe in all of the reviews I've read of these when I was searching for expresscards, that they utilise the USB bus.

The expresscard slot in your machine has two connections. One is the pcie and one is the usb. Now clearly, you want things to be connecting via the pcie, but unfortunately not many expresscard SSDs actually connect via the USB. The thing to look for is max read speeds. If they are not past 48Mb/s then it's using the USB interface.

They are still worth something though, as it means you can have a 32GB memory stick in your machine to transfer things to other laptops / pcs with expresscard slots. But in reality, other than that they are useless. You could use it for readyboost, but that only works on 4GB of space, unless you are using Windows 7, but I don't think the performance increase would be worth the price.

If you find one that has read speeds of more than USB speeds, then make sure you ask the seller to confirm that these are not what the device is capable of (internally) but that is what you'd get when you plugged it into your notebook. I've seen some seller lying, and have called them up on it.

There are expresscard SSDs that utilise the pcie bus, but last time I checked they were incredibly expensive.

And don't go thinking you could use it as a boot device. You might be able to in USB mode possibly (I don't know, never tried it). But first you'd have to get it to install to there. Secondly, you have to hope your laptop BIOS supports booting from that slot.

Do some searching on these forums, there has been talk about this before - but I don't think it got anywhere in the end.

Regards

 

At $100, you might as well get a real SSD like a 32GB Indilinx-based drive. As far as I know, all ExpressCard SSDs up 'til now have been more or less underwhelming; most of the reviews I've seen have ranked them slower than conventional hard drives. So yeah, to second Fragilexx, they're pretty useless.

 

Here's one that I'd buy if I were in the market for one

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161325