Use Expresscard ssd as boot drive!

I recently put myself in a difficult situation by ordering a dell xt tablet which is basically stuck with a slow 1.8 hdd 4200 rpm, with realistic hdd upgrade options starting at 200 dollars for a 32GB ssd

Ive been looking at ALL possible options and finally decided to give this a try:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161324

It looks like you should be able to boot from it because it requires a jmicron controller to operate in windows. The drivers from filemate give directions for installing windows on it in the readme.

I found one confirmation of the jmicron controllers being bootable here after a bit of searching:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=665163

I really wanted to give this a try but they sent me a 64GB usb based card instead BUT I tested it in my dell vostro 1500 which has a very similar bios to the dell xt tablet (They sent me the 1.2 ghz version had to send it back in for 1.33 version) and was able to boot from it!!!

Unfortunately the speeds were not very good at all only ~30 Read and ~ 20 write.

The replacement that I just got in the mail benches at 100 Read and 40 Write!! Thats even better than the 1.8 Mtron drives which only do about 70/30 from what i hear.

I tested the ssd in a sony vaio vgn-220

here are the hdd benchmarks from the stock hdd:



and here are the benchmarks from the expresscard ssd:



From the looks of it should definately be able to run an os off this thing!

Im going to slipstream the drivers into windows and see if im able to run windows. Will post back with results!!!

BTW with msn live cashback I got the ssd from tigerdirect for 105 dollars. Pretty slick for this kind of performance I have to say.

 

I'm glad you made this post, theres a big gap in info about these drives. The first few made were show, expensive, and small.

Current ones though are very fast and are getting cheaper and larger. I could see in about a year buying two of these and doing a RAID0 to run the OS and programs off of. Then use the harddrive to store everything else. I mean I'm only using about 40-50GB no counting data and backups.

Thoughts by anyone else? I would expect that in a year we could get ~300MB/s from two of these in RAID0/1 for reads at least, perhaps they will also have proper controllers by then?

Do tell us about how intstalling your OS goes, are you using XP or Vista?

 

Well in order to use two of them you would need some sort of adapter. The card fits flush with the notebook and does not stick out at all. Also after doing some research it turns out that this card is basically like a pcie sata card that you would put into a desktop.

The pcie interface allows for very fast transfer speeds so what we will see in the future is probably bigger faster cheaper drives.

Performance is so good that if it works on my dell xt im just going to take the hdd out!

Ill just run everything off the expresscard ssd. I can always just use a flash card or usb drive for extra storage when I really need it and my desktop has over 3TB of storage which I use as network drives when im at home for videos etc.

I will be installing xp tablet on my gf tx2000 as a test run in a few min

 

Well I've got a T61p, so I have two slots and I assume that two would fit at once.

I'm glad they switched to the PCIe interface, they were using the built in USB2.0 for pretty much everything since it came out, and that was painfully slow since the USB blocked any reason to get faster cards.

 

O wow I wish I had 2 expresscard slots

You could definately raid them together then in windows at least. In windows the driver setup also installs a raid configurer. I think windows itself supports raid 0 via disk management.

Im not sure about putting them in raid outside of windows though (installing windows on the raid 0 disks) because each card has its own raid/sata controller

 

Well I tried installing windows on the hp tablet and I get bluescreens everytime during the install. Its probably because I need to slipstream some hp drivers or something but I dont have any more cd's or dvd's to waste =(

My replacement dell comes in on monday so I'll give it a shot then.

 

Comparing sequential writes (100/40 vs 70/30) doesn't make a big difference as unpublished random writes are a lot more important, and a big factor contributing to stutter.

 

I was under the impression that you can't boot from express slot.. that would be awesome if i'm wrong!

 

You might want to buy a CD-RW or DVD-RW. There a bit expensive, but can save you a lot of money if you need a bunch of tries to get the disk made right.

Comparing SSDs requires a massive amount of benchmarks that are few and far between. Drives of similar design that have faster sequential writes will probably expereince a bit faster random write as well. Having two also cuts studdering issues by half according to most benchmarks.

My thought was more a year or two away when we had proper controllers. Either something like the new Vertex type firmware, or something similar to the modern Samsung/Intel controllers.

I'm still confused on this too. I don't know any reason the hardware couldn't do it other then lazy engineering though.

-------------------------------------

VVV Sorry, its Vertex not Vector. The Vertex SSD features revised firmware that trades sequencial speed for random access time and random read speed. VVV

 

What is this vector firmware of which you speak?

 

Someone trying to put mac osx on a dell xt has confirmed that you can indeed boot from a usb based expresscard. (The post is somewhere in the link i posted above) I put the usb based one i recieved inside my vostro and i was able to see it in my bios as well.

Im hoping that it will do the same with the pcie version of the card. We'll see soon enough

 

Make sure you create backup discs first before you try to go on ahead with tweaking your HDD...

 

I put a lot of effort into research for this theory on my ThinkPad x200 Tablet ( see THIS THREAD) using a 34mm 16GB Mtron SLC SSD.

Ultimately, I reached the conclusion that it is NOT possible to boot from an ExpressCard based SSD, and it is generally not possible to install an OS to a USB based SSD (although it is bootable). Note that this applies to current ThinkPads and the Dell BIOS may allow you to boot from an ExpressCard SSD.

Here's my recommendation:

You can get a 1.8" Samsung SLC SSD for a very good price on Newegg at the moment ( $115 for 32GB, $179 for 64GB [currently sold out]). This SSD is better than all the current ExpressCard SSDs at the moment because it is SLC, stable, and extremely energy efficient (see my full review in the SSD link in my sig).

Use the Samsung SSD as your boot drive (I have the 64GB drive with a 1.8" to 2.5" adapter in my x200T) and augment that with bulk storage for media files using SDHC and/or ExpressCard based solutions.

 

Wow I completely forgot about this thread. I never really got to test out my expresscard ssd inside my dell xt because it had problems and I returned it for a refund. The problem with those samsung drives is that they are sata based and the dell xt uses zif hard drives.

Also I ran across a forum where they succesfully installed vista and xp onto usb based hard drives so I know its possible. I tried googling for the site again but cant seem to find it. Here is one for xp

http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

I since got a dell xt2 tablet and installed a 80GB intel ssd and Im very happy with it. I can get abou5 4.5 to 5 hours out of the battery unlike the power hungry dell xt.