expresscards in t4x...

[sarbin]

g'day!

coupla expresscard ?s for you t4x experts, please...

- does the t43 expresscard slot accept 34mm cards or only full-size cards?

- anyone here use an expresscard ssd in their t4x?

i'm thinking about getting an ec ssd (like http://store.lexar.com/?productid=EX8GB-431 or maybe the 16gb version) and using it for scratch/temp/etc space. maybe even the pagefile if it would work and if the performance is comparable to the internal hd (72k60).

tia!

[aaa]

Why? What are you doing that would benefit from that, and not from the cheaper option of getting more ram? Only use I can think of is if you're opening some huge multi gigabyte files that could use something faster than an HD pagefile... but be aware that the small cheap SSDs can be shockingly slow (esp. write speed, make sure you check the specs before you buy). I don't understand how it would help as temp space (feel free to correct me).

The other benefit is using it as your main disk to save battery life and reduce noise, but you don't seem to be going that route.

[davidspalding]

I believe my T43 will take both sizes of Express Card ... if there are still only two sizes.

I use an Express Card SD reader, and booted from a Fedora 9 "live CD" in the EC slot. Seems to work about as fast doing it from a USB memory card reader.

I guess if you don't have a 2nd HDD adapter in the UltraBay slim, you could use it for scratch space for Photoshop and the like. But I don't know if a flash drive would be as fast as a 7200 rpm drive...

[sjthinkpader]

There are some useful info in this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=

I think SSD is fastest for browser use. Since the elements in a web page is frequently cached, it circumvent the slow write speed of a SSD. The numerous files a web page accesses also give SSD advantage since they have no track stepping delay.

Worst case for SSD will be for photo viewing. There are few files but of large size. So HDD doesn't need to step as much and fast read/write speed wins out.

I also use a SD reader in my EC slot.

[Maccess]

SSDs have read times faster than hard drives, but have write times many times slower than hard drives. This is mainly because flash drives need to erase and write an entire sector to change a single block.

The expresscard has two interfaces, one passes through the USB bus (efectively just a repackaged USB port), the other uses the PCI-Express Bus.

Most memory cards and card readers use the USB bus, but there is one ExpressCard SSD that uses the PCI-E bus. The Hagiwara card is also inordinately expensive.

http://www.hsc-us.com/Consumer2/express ... p34fd.html

[sjthinkpader]

SSDs have read times faster than hard drives, but have write times many times slower than hard drives. This is mainly because flash drives need to erase and write an entire sector to change a single block....

A fast CF card is almost as fast as a fast 2.5 inch HDD for read speed (media transfer). Once the HDD has to seek, then it lose out. When the data is contiguous and file size is large on the HDD, it will be faster than SSD. See my comment in the other thread.

There are ways to handle write without erasing entire block but the block has to have blank space. Erase, reclaim is frequently done in the background. So the card will become slow once the card is full of dirty data. The card then commence erase/reclaim to free up space. Nevertheless even a relatively fast card in my example in the other thread has only 20% of the write speed of a fast HDD.

[iamdmc]

Wait a second...


Doesn't the T40 series have Cardbus-32?

Expresscard (32 or 54) are only found in the T60 series.

[sjthinkpader]

T40, T41, T42 have Cardbus and T43 has Cardbus+ExpressCard.

[sarbin]

thanks, everyone, for your input.