[ltp] Re: Buying a New Thinkpad

[Robert Tomsick]

On Wed, 2011-05-04 at 16:05 -0300, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Do I understand correctly that you can add an expresscard SSD drive and
> > use it as the boot drive, leaving the original spinning drive in place
> > to use for storage? This might be the best way to go. I could, for
> 
> SSD != SSD
> 
> I don't know of any expresscard SSD that comes anywhere close to the
> performance of a 2½" SATA SSD drive.  Most of the expresscard SSD I've
> seen seemed to be using the USB interface of the expresscard slot, so
> you're really talking about a USB flash key in an expresscard
> form factor.

It's also important to note that while there are a number of non-SATA
SSDs with reasonable-looking sequential transfer speeds, their random IO
performance is often vastly inferior to modern "value"-level 2.5" SSDs.
Unless your workload consists almost entirely of transferring large
files with little to no random access, that means that they may not
deliver the performance boost you're looking for (and, in the case of
drives which use the first-gen JMicron controllers, may even perform
worse than a mechanical drive.)

-Rob