PCMCIA - poor performance?

Been doing a little bit of a check on this across the forums and there seems to be some evidence that the performance of the PCMCIA slots in HPs is well below par.

I've read in some cases devices are not seen (or it's a job to get them seen) or speeds are poor.

I bought a SATA card to connect the esata external enclosures I've got. I wanted to get a PCMCIA card so I could use it addtionally in my old Tosh.

The Tosh worked a treat after driver install..saw enclosure and drive, HD Tune produced high 60 MB/s in tests. Install it in the nc6320..slow to find, driver took an age to find. Once it was installed I couldn't see the drive..did some plugging and unplugging..managed to crash the machine. Finally got it to see the drive and tested, and saw a dreadful 2.5 MB/s .

I looked for updated card driver on the web, installed that..same result. Along the way I managed to corrupt an .avi file, making it useless..Not happy.

Then I tested it PCMCIA slot with my old USB card that I'd used on the Tosh (didn't have USB2). No problems with the card but tests were still not up to where you'd expect around 10-11 MB/s compared to 13-15 with the Tosh.

So I've come to the conclusion the slot is not up to scratch in the machine. It's a Texas Instruments PCIxx12. I did find another HP thread who had this cardbus controller and issues. I can't find any updated drivers or info of any use on this controller. There's certainly nothing on the HP downloads.

So has anyone here got any clues or some pointers?

I've just ordered an esata expresscard which should be with me tomorrow. Hoping for better luck with that..can't say I'm superconfident though. Has anyone had joy with expresscards?