Lexar recently unveiled its ExpressCard SSD line, a collection of solid state drives that come in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB flavors. I’ve had the opportunity to test one of the 8GB models extensively over the past couple of weeks and I’m now prepared to deliver my thoughts. Does it deliver?
In short, no. Although the drive itself is Mac compatible, it is designed for PC use. All of its software is PC only, so its auto-backup function does nothing on Mac.
The drive is optimized for Windows Vista. Specifically for its ReadyBoost function. ReadyBoost allows users to enhance system performance by fast caching data directly to the ExpressCard SSD. The problem is that the card is interpolated through USB 2.0 rather than PCI Express, which means the SSD accesses at just 480Mbps rather than the 2.5Gbps supported through PCI-E.
Consider also that the DDR2 memory typically used in systems transfers at least 3.2GBps and that SATA hard drives have throughputs of 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps. The numbers show that ReadyBoost is only truly valid with PCI-E based ExpressCards.
As far as extra storage goes, it’s an acceptable solution. I achieved access speeds that were exactly on par with my USB 2.0 flash drives — it wrote at about 4MBps and read at about 13MBps. That said, I can’t see any that someone would purchase this over, say, any other flash drive on the market.
It consumes your ExpressCard slot and provides no performance gain whatsoever. So until a PCI-E version exists, stick with the thumb drives. This technology hasn’t come ’round yet.
EXTREMELY useful review Blake — many thanks!
You are completely beside the point Blake. This product is to serve as an SSD disk, which means that you are going to judge it and review for it’s random access times, and not for it’s data transfers! No one is silly enough to buy an SSD for storing music or videos in it, so as to be concerned on it’s transfer rates… An SSD is used for speeding up application and OS loading times, as they deal a lot with random (and not sequental) data reads from disks, and I would bet that this product is going to be perfect for that use (although the cost per GB is high yet, and it’s going to drop over the next months).
In other words, you should be more carefull when making reviews… or even beter, you could spend your PC time on playing games, and leave the reviews for others :)
I agree with Blake 100%!
As a contractor working for intel, I have been fortunate enough to work with some of Intels new technologies, spacificly some validation work with Intels Turbo Memory. This technology applies readyboost to NAND flash via pci-e bus. Not only for drive caching but also system memory caching. Very very nice stuff! This product was recently released with SantaRosa mobil platforms. The validation prototype I use are actualy on 1x pci-e cards. I hope this will become available to the market for PC’s as I have experianced atleast 20-30% increase in performance. I dont think readyboost on pci-e bus can even compare with bottlenecked USB 2.0
Love your review. Keep up the good work!
Tony Axtell
Thx for the review. I don’t understand why they even make them when they are so slow – I would rather pay 3x as much for 50/50 MB/s read/write along with near-zero access times. Then I could use it to speed up either the OS or my daily work. But as slow as it is, it’s only good for backup, and for that a USB stick would be more appropriate, cheaper, and more flexible.
I agree with Spiros. ReadyBoost is not directly relevant to sequential read/write times. It is about random access and response time. Buy the time a HDD spins up locates all the sectors of data etc a flash based drive will have responded and returned the data much faster.
This is been proven many times when you compare SSD sata/IDE drives vs their traditional HDD equivalents. The transfer speed on a sequential write is poorer on the SSD but in actual use performance is better on the SSD because of the near instant response times.
Whether the SSD uses USB2.0 or PCI-E is also irrelevant when the read/write speed of the flash memory is so much lower. 480MB/s of USB 2.0 is more than enough bandwidth when your read/write times don’t exceed 20mb/s.
I still will hold out for better devices though as Corsair’s USB sticks with the GT suffix read at 34mb/s and read at 25mb/s via USB and cost less/megabyte.
I am looking to buy a notebook Expresscard SSD with decent sustained read/write speeds because I want to run Virtual Machines on it to reduce the wear and tear and heating of my installed notebook hard drive. 16GB at good speeds (15+MB/s read and write) would work for me.
Try the Trancend one – they publish their speeds unlike Lexar and they quote over 18mb read and 8mb write: http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp?ModNo=162&SpNo=3&LangNo=0
So far haven’t seen a SSD express card that can match the 34mb/s read and 25mb/s write of the Corsair GT USB memory sticks. They go upto 32GB! but they don’t use the Expresscard slot. I hope they make an express card version eventually to save having it sticking out all the time
http://www.corsair.com/products/voyager.aspx
Delkin’s 16GB ExpressCard SSD tests at 48 MB/s read and 27 MB/s write. The website says 45/35 but I called and checked.
The Delkin card looks good:
http://www.delkin.com/products/memorycards/solid-state-drive/solid-state-drive.html
But at $399 for the 16GB is pretty steep
I just bought a Lexar 8gb and spent an hour testing it. Blake is dead on. Don’t waste your time “ready boosting” or trying to do anyother type of boosting with this product. Without a respectable throughput it doesn’t matter how well a drive accesses random bits. Wish I read this before I wasted my time. My performance USB flash drive out reads and writes the Lexar 8gb SSD.
Just bought this card for my sony laptop… Amazing product. Plugged into my laptop and got 4gb extra ram using readyboost.
Bought mine at an amazing price at http://www.truedeals.co.uk
Great review, Blake! I didn’t realize this ExpressCard is essentially a fake since it’s USB. What’s the point? For those who believe M$ marketing , go try using a fast USB drive as Ready Boost to see it makes no difference. It is a terrible technology with currently available components unless you have some obsolete SLOW drive and woefully not enough RAM. I’m looking at it for my Mac side (Time Machine or VMware images), and I’m glad to know this product is a waste of time.
@Mee
Firstly, ReadyBoost and ExpressCard slots are entirely different. ExpressCard is a type of connection like Firewire or USB. It has different features than USB and is potentially faster depending on what you are using it for. The other advantage is you don’t have a USB dongle sticking out as it is internal.
ReadyBoost as discussed on many sites and in the comments is dependant on the quality and speed of your memory stick. As I blogged a while ago a poor quality or slow memory card/stick can actually reduce performance. It is not used in place of RAM – more RAM would obviously be more beneficial in most cases. However, there is a limit as to how much ram you can install, whether this be because of the high price or whether your system will not support more. ReadyBoost is cheap option that lets you improve performance by reducing time spent accessing a IDE/SATA HDD.
For example at work my antique rig crawls along with it’s 5400rpm IDE HDD and 2GB of DDR I ram. With Vista I can insert an 8GB memory stick to help boost performance. Would it make my system run like it had 10GB of Ram – of course not. Would it make a difference to overall performance – yes.
Obviously getting a solid state drive, 4GB of ram and a quad core processor would be ideal. However, spending £20 on a 4-8GB memory stick is a lot more affordable for a small improvement to performance.