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Christianb

Best way to add high performance secondary Flash storage to an old laptop

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Hi Gang,

 

I have a client with an old Inspiron 6400 Laptop (maxed at 2GB of RAM) that is now running Windows 7.  He will get out of memory errors if I don't enable a swapfile, but that swapfile will also wear out his internal 2.5" SATA SSD.  What I'd like to do is one of these solutions to host the swapfile

  • get a SD card reader that fits entirely inside the ExpressCard slot (so it can be left in all the time without anything protuding)
  • use a fast SD card in the card reader slot (it won't support CompactFlash), but that will stick out a little
  • use an external flash drive
  • use an mSATA card (but not sure if his old Inspiron 6400 will support that, it doesn't have to boot off of it just needs to work in Windows)
  • expresscard SSD Drive (these seem very expensive and therefore are the least appealing)

I'm interested in an ExpressCard SD card reader, but I'm concerned some will mount as USB vs. PCIe.  His laptop is only USB 2.0, which means that the speed of the SD Card would be limited to 40MBps.  Does anyone know of an ExpressCard SD card reader that mounts as PCIe so that it can go faster than USB 2.0?  Does anyone know of an expresscard reader that doesn't stick out?  I'd like to solve this secondary flash storage solution for under $65 if possible.  Is there ExpressCard RAM he can use instead, I know that the older PCMCIA spec allowed you to plug in more RAM, but I don't think that's possible today? 

 

Thanks,
Christian

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