Hello Tim and Group,
I'm not sure where to put this on this forum, so I'm placing it here, because at least it's "storage" albeit not a NAS topic per se. It may interest you because you're all quite savvy on here.
I have been following the SSD developments over the past few months with eagerness. Also, tied to this I have been watching the marketing claims from Microsoft about ReadyBoost and how it's supposed to benefit Vista. I tried Readyboost on a couple machines and always found that it didn't seem to help at all. I believe it was Extremetech and maybe also Anandtech who did some "benchmarks" and also found that Readyboost didn't do much.
We don't see many ExpressCard SSD drives or Readyboost branded USB thumb drives in shops here in Canada, but I was quite struck with how prominently they were displayed in OfficeMax and BestBuy shops in the US when I went there throughout the year on business.
Anyways, for other reasons I abandoned Vista on my laptop (long story) and so I had this readyboost 32GB ExpressCard sitting there with no job any more.
So I figured for a lark, I'd try to get XP running on the SSD. 32G is enough room for that. O my! Did I have a learning curve to climb!
ExpressCard, as you know, is the successor for Cardbus, which itself is the successor for PCMCIA. These three card types follow the main 3 bus types that have come and gone over the years. PCMCIA is ISA, Cardbus is PCI, and ExpressCard is PCI-E. Nice and simple, right? NO!
If you read the fine print, you'll see that ExpressCard is a dual interface - it does PCI-E, but also it does USB. So, depending on the type of card you slide into the slot, you might be using a blazing fast PCI-E card, or a lame slow USB.
Now I found out, to my frustration, that my 32GB ExpressCard SSD is actually USB! Should have read the fine print. So now I'm thinking - no wonder We're not seeing improved performance with Readyboost. All these ReadyBoost drive companies are blowing smoke that their SSD drives are faster than regular disk, which will make Vista Faster as it uses the SSD for a ReadyBoost cache, but they are ignoring the fact that their SSD is squeezing through a slow USB interface, which is much much slower than a regular hard drive!
No wonder no one is seeing performance improvements from Readyboost!
I did some quick benchmarking and found that my "fast" ExpressCard SSD was actually about 1/5th the speed of my 5400rpm hard drive.
So my question to all of you: Are we being fleeced en masse by Transcend and Sandisk and all of these other ExpressCard SSD makers claiming blazing ReadyBoost speed? Or did I just get a bad one? Are there actually any ExpressCard SSD drives out there that are truly PCI-E, and not USB?
What do you think?
I'm not sure where to put this on this forum, so I'm placing it here, because at least it's "storage" albeit not a NAS topic per se. It may interest you because you're all quite savvy on here.
I have been following the SSD developments over the past few months with eagerness. Also, tied to this I have been watching the marketing claims from Microsoft about ReadyBoost and how it's supposed to benefit Vista. I tried Readyboost on a couple machines and always found that it didn't seem to help at all. I believe it was Extremetech and maybe also Anandtech who did some "benchmarks" and also found that Readyboost didn't do much.
We don't see many ExpressCard SSD drives or Readyboost branded USB thumb drives in shops here in Canada, but I was quite struck with how prominently they were displayed in OfficeMax and BestBuy shops in the US when I went there throughout the year on business.
Anyways, for other reasons I abandoned Vista on my laptop (long story) and so I had this readyboost 32GB ExpressCard sitting there with no job any more.
So I figured for a lark, I'd try to get XP running on the SSD. 32G is enough room for that. O my! Did I have a learning curve to climb!
ExpressCard, as you know, is the successor for Cardbus, which itself is the successor for PCMCIA. These three card types follow the main 3 bus types that have come and gone over the years. PCMCIA is ISA, Cardbus is PCI, and ExpressCard is PCI-E. Nice and simple, right? NO!
If you read the fine print, you'll see that ExpressCard is a dual interface - it does PCI-E, but also it does USB. So, depending on the type of card you slide into the slot, you might be using a blazing fast PCI-E card, or a lame slow USB.
Now I found out, to my frustration, that my 32GB ExpressCard SSD is actually USB! Should have read the fine print. So now I'm thinking - no wonder We're not seeing improved performance with Readyboost. All these ReadyBoost drive companies are blowing smoke that their SSD drives are faster than regular disk, which will make Vista Faster as it uses the SSD for a ReadyBoost cache, but they are ignoring the fact that their SSD is squeezing through a slow USB interface, which is much much slower than a regular hard drive!
No wonder no one is seeing performance improvements from Readyboost!
I did some quick benchmarking and found that my "fast" ExpressCard SSD was actually about 1/5th the speed of my 5400rpm hard drive.
So my question to all of you: Are we being fleeced en masse by Transcend and Sandisk and all of these other ExpressCard SSD makers claiming blazing ReadyBoost speed? Or did I just get a bad one? Are there actually any ExpressCard SSD drives out there that are truly PCI-E, and not USB?
What do you think?
