ExpressCard SSD for fast editing?
 

Hi everyone:

My 2007 mac book pro is a great little computer, but with a 160 gb hard drive I am always looking for more storage. Any way I can speed up my editing, exporting, compressing and DVD creation would be a welcome improvement. (I will have my Mac Book hard drive upgraded to a bigger faster drive soon.)

Right now, I edit with Final Cut Pro with a firewire 800 connected lacie external drive for all my files.

I saw that some vendors have a express card SSD 'hard disk' which theoretically should be very fast. Here's one with 48 gigs of space for $150 US. Amazon.com: Wintec FileMate 48GB Ultra ExpressCard: TigerDirect

Has anyone tried buying one of these and using it for an editing drive? It seems like the technology should be faster in the "real world" than my firewire 800 drive. They claim a read speed of 115 MB/second and a write speed of 65 MB/s, while Lacie claims a max burst speed of 85 MBytes/second.

I'm a little skeptical about these "theoretical" max speeds. I doubt if we really get performance that fast in the real world.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks.

John

I saw this article the other day and it's kind of related to what you are wanting to do:

Add an ExpressCard solid state drive to some MacBook Pros | Storage - Page 1 | Macworld

dave

I'm using the Apple 256GB SSD under WinXP. Using HDTach for measurement, I'm seeing *Average* read speeds of about 220 MB/sec. That drive is obviously faster than anything I've used before, including the 10k RPM WD 150GB Raptor. Though, I'd be careful with buying the cheapie drives. For a desktop, I'd rather have the Intel X25-E Extreme Single Layer Cell (SLC) product with the lower capacity of 32GB or 64GB. You want to avoid MLC products as they are not only slower but also less reliable as they wear out faster. All SSDs and flash memory wear out.

If you really want speed, use a RAM disk. You can experiment to find if a really fast but smaller "drive" helps your editing. I use SuperSpeed's RAM disk under WinXP. Here is a page for OSX, though I have not tried this myself.

Create a RAM Disk in Mac OS X - OS X Daily