Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I am wondering if anyone is using a minipci ssd in their T61. Amazon Japan is selling one with 32 GB fairly cheaply.
Are these minipci-ssd very fast or slow?
I am thinking about putting linux on it and just mounting the regular hd as /home.

If anyone has some experience to share, I'd be grateful.

I hope, I am allowed a bump, as I asked over the holidays
Thanks for any hints whether it's possible.

Same here, would like to load linux (and virtual machines) onto a mini pcie ssd and /home onto a sata ssd on a W500.

I am looking for a mini pcie ssd using SLC 32 or 64 GB with a controller of the memory chips that allows a read and a write speed of ~400MB/s. for a desktop machine this exists already (http://www.fusionio.com/Products.aspx), just needs to be shrinked (by intel?) to a mini pcie format; together with the UBIFS file system, new to the >2.6.27 kernels of linux:
"For example, it is known that some vendors optimize their FTL devices for FAT, and if you start using ext3 on top of it, you might face some unexpected problems or the device may become not as good as you would imagine." http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ ... raw_vs_ftl
saw that newegg also has some minipcie MLC ssd drives, but they report (and I think these are) slow speeds, probably due to a poor controller.

My sata ssd will be intel's 64GB SLC

I would like to do the same. I believe all of these 'cheap' units will be slow, however. Most seem to be for netbook storage and are about the speed of USB 2.0 thumbdrives. The speed would not bother me (like your mounting of /home, I would use this as a document drive), but I am concerned about whether we could use these devices with BIOS whitelist issue that has been discussed before.

On a side note, Verbatim just announced new expresscard SSD's that are considerably faster (still not close to sata drive speeds) but go for up to $300 for 64 Gig. This may be an expensive, alternative.