CrunchGear

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