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Comment by jaxn | Hacker News Reader

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jaxn·

Would this have any real performance benefit over a traditional SSD?

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Size, and I’m assuming speed but I don’t know anything about the express card interface so it might be slow.

Also if you just want to cram more drive in your laptop

It's just a single PCIe 2.0 lane. Pretty much the same bandwidth as SATA3

Mentioned on the linked Indiegogo page¹:

“What's the speed limit?

The ExpressCard slot is limited to a single PCI-E 2.0 lane. This means the real-world speed bottleneck is 500MB/s, which is roughly the speed of SATA 6Gb/s (SATA 3).

Pre-Sandy Bridge models (T410/X201 and older) are limited to PCI-E 1.1, which is roughly 250MB/s.”

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¹ — https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/thinkmods-expresscard-nvm...

NVMe is somehow better in random access performance. Also ThinkPads before X240 has no space to accommodate M.2/NVMe as those machines predates the standard.

Personally I wish(ed) if there were 2.5” shaped GPU than SSD though

A decent GPU in this format would be awesome! Especially since the X220 series can accomodate a 2.5' SSD as well as an m.2 SATA SSD already.

You can already connect external GPUs thru this interface on the X220.

You can but not on your lap

I doubt any time soon you will be able to fit a GPU (and power it!) thru a express card slot...

> A decent GPU in this format would be awesome!

Good luck with finding a decent GPU that small, let alone with power and thermal profile to support being in an expresscard slot.

I don’t really know for sure but my intuition is NVMe can win in random access and latency because it has much larger command queues and typically multiple queues (so each CPU thread can have its own queue.)

does this (T410) look in any way worth it ? https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1adoQGVXXXXaxXFXXq6xXFXXX4/200...

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