First Review: Lexar ExpressCard SSD April 23, 2007

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Lexar's ExpressCard solid state drive is an interesting proposition: 4 to 16 gigabytes of non-volatile memory in a slot form factor. That's not only more storage than typical USB flash drives can offer, but more than most based on microdrives can, too. For those with lappies with ExpressCard slots, it would seem like a sweet piece of storage, and even as a cache for Vista's ReadyBoost, since its not hanging off the side of a laptop like a USB thumbdrive would. So what's the catch?

Unfortunately, I found write performance to be a lot lower than I'd have liked.

It read a fair 15MB per second on several machines, confirmed using both synthetic and MP3 file copies. But only wrote at 3MB per second.

For comparison, the laptop drive in the DV9000 HP Pavilion churned about 30MB per second in both reads and writes, and the Lexar Lightning, the fastest USB drive I had on hand, scored 17MB and 14MB per seconds in reads/writes.

In a nutshell, write speeds really need to be much better before I can recommend it.

–Brian Lam

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