SSD and eSATA

Hi Guys,

I was hoping to gain some insight on an issue I am pondering over. I have read Flamenko's guides on SSDs and in general, it seems that SSDs have some advantages. Now, I have a friend who is getting a funded laptop purchase with no theoretical upper limit, and after I spoke to him about SSDs, he is hooked. The question however is that he requires large amounts of storage, so we were both wondering if the following would be possible:

Buy a laptop with a 64 GB SSD and use it mainly to install programs and store documents on the system. Buy an external hard drive with eSATA output and buy a PC Card Express with eSATA for the laptop, and use the external hard drive for video, music, photos, etc. His concern is even with eSATA, would you get the same transfer speeds, etc. as an internal higher capacity SATA drive. I.e., could he theoretically install programs onto the eSATA drive as well, and expect it run as fast as an internal hard drive.

Thanks in advance!

 

ExpressCard eSATA is almost as fast as an internal drive. Easily gets 60-70MB/s, where most laptop drives top out between 70-80MB/s.

 

Greg,

Thanks for the quick reply! So this sounds very promising then. Do you have any recommendations for a good PC Card express eSATA card, or would any work?

Thanks,

Booji

 

Get a 17" and have an SSD and an internal SATA drive

 

Or wait until they get the larger ssd drives out, which I heard are
coming!!

 

You guys are great. I read an article which quoted the price of a 128gb SSD at approximately 3000 USD. <-- Yeah right!!! Although technically the sky is the limit in terms of pricing on this laptop, my friend/colleague I don't think, can justify 3k for a hard drive. I guess once this technology becomes more main stream in the future, prices will start plummetting. Besides, considering the theoretical bottleneck on SSDs, and with the rapidly plumetting prices of the standard flash drives, I forsee that these drives should become somewhate affordable within the next year.

Thanks to everyone for their responses.

booji

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=84710

This eSATA card was reviewed for NBR, and it works great. I have a PCMCIA version that uses the same internal ICs and performance isn't that much worse (PCMCIA is slower than EC).

Sabrent, Vantec, and PNY all make EC and PCMCIA eSATA Cards. But almost ALL the cards utilize the same chips made by Silicon Image (IC company) so performance and quality will be VERY similar between all of them.