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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Mac Notebooks > Boot Mac OS X from SSD ExpressCard?

Boot Mac OS X from SSD ExpressCard?
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chipchen
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Jun 6, 2007, 11:09 PM
 
Wonder how fast a solid state drive would be?

Wonder if you can book from the ExpressCard slot?

I bought a Lexar 8GB SSD ExpressCard today. Later tonight I'll try to install OS X on it and see how it goes.

Any interest on finding out how my little experiment goes?
     
Big Mac
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Jun 6, 2007, 11:12 PM
 
Sounds interesting, if it hasn't already been attempted. People are already doing such things with Linux, right?

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
     
tiger
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Jun 7, 2007, 12:45 AM
 
If it is possible, then osx would boot instantly... but is there a way to put the installation on one drive and the user accounts/applications on another? I didn't think that was possible.
     
chipchen  (op)
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Jun 7, 2007, 02:29 AM
 
So it comes to a sad end.. for now anyway.

The Mac OS X Install DVD will not install on the ExpressCard. Oh well...

About OS X booting instantly... solid state isn't instantaneous... it's still got speed bottlenecks like everything else.
     
cdunbar
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Jun 8, 2007, 11:41 PM
 
A buddy dropped off an 8 GB Lexar SSD ExpressCard tonight. While I had trouble trying to install Tiger onto it, an early beta of Leopard is loading as I type. I just heard it reboot so I should have an opportunity to test it soon. Unfortunately, my research into these cards suggests that they are at best as fast as a USB flash drive and often times slower. Still, it will be fun to play with.

Regards,
Chris
     
cdunbar
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Jun 9, 2007, 12:02 AM
 
I am making this post from Leopard running on the SSD drive. Overall performance is poor. Some of that is certainly because this is an early beta of Leopard and it probably has a bunch of debug code running. Having said that, I've played with Leopard before and it was not this slow. A couple of things are pretty impressive: I have never seen the Finder so responsive. I double click the SSD drive icon and the window appears instantly. The things that seem to be slowest are those that have to write to the drive. I read that the SSD drives (at least the ExpressCard versions) suffer on write performance. An example is Safari. Loading any new web page is slow.

I wonder how much of the slowness is caused by the ExpressCard slot and not the SSD drive itself. I don't know much about the ExpressCard interface, but I'm guessing that it is the bottleneck. I bet an SSD drive in a hard drive form factor would be much more responsive. Does anybody have any information on that?

Regards,
Chris
     
chipchen  (op)
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Jun 9, 2007, 06:59 AM
 
I do wanna buy a SSD hard drive... just, they're really expensive right now...
     
richwig83
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Jun 9, 2007, 07:22 AM
 
Originally Posted by tiger View Post
If it is possible, then osx would boot instantly... but is there a way to put the installation on one drive and the user accounts/applications on another? I didn't think that was possible.
I don't think that would happen... not instantly anyway!!

Flash drives are fast but are far from instant!

Check out some reviews of SS hard disk that people have used in PCs(sorry) and the results are far from impressive!!!
MacBook Pro 2.2 i7 | 4GB | 128GB SSD ~ 500GB+2TB Externals ~ iPhone 4 32GB
Canon 5DII | EF 24-105mm IS USM | EF 100-400mm L IS USM | 50mm 1.8mkII
iMac | Mac Mini | 42" Panasonic LED HDTV | PS3
     
ast3r3x
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Jun 10, 2007, 05:00 PM
 
It might be a little slower, but I wonder how much better the battery life is. I'd imagine it would be notably better if you booted up off of a flash drive and has your internal HD spun down.

Could one of you test this and let us know? I'd be interested in doing this as an option if I'm going to be away from a power source for an extended period of time. Just keep a copy of OS X on a flash drive and use that for simple tasks like web browsing and text editing when I'm at school.
     
inkhead
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Jun 10, 2007, 06:23 PM
 
Leopard should allow you to boot. Leopard can also use fast ExpressCard memory for speeding up the OS like windows readyboost, only better
     
inkhead
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Jul 6, 2007, 02:36 AM
 
FYI most flash memory is slower than hard disk in general. That $10 USB key you bought at Fry's? It's not going to be speedy.

There are different types of memory just like different types of RAM. NAND memory like the kind in the iPod Nano's is really fast, but cheep USB keys generally use super-slow solid state memory, also many of the expresscards coming out that are memory cards are also slow as well.
     
Mister Elf
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Jul 9, 2007, 05:55 PM
 
Also bear in mind that ExpressCard can use either USB 2.0 orPCIe for a connection bus. It would appear, in this case, that the SSD uses USB 2.0.
Midshipman 3/C, USNR
     
gametime10
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Aug 15, 2007, 11:16 PM
 
Interesting...

Fun with Solid State Drives | 9 to 5 Mac

So there is a bit of a quiet revolution going on in the computer world lately. Solid State drives (drives is a legacy term that needs to go - it is not a drive at all) have been coming way down in price over the past few years to the point where they may actually make sense for some normal power users. Now I am not saying that you should take out your current hard drive and replace it with something marginally faster and about 10 times the price in terms of Gb/$. That isn't fun.
80 Gb 2.5 inch HD = $60
64GB 2.5 inch solid state >$600
Yes, MacBook hard drives are easy to replace, but, last time I checked, it wasn't that much fun to take the hard drive out of a MacBook Pro. Plus that is kinda pricey.
So what I decided to do is get a Lexar Solid State Express Card from Amazon. They happened to be having a sale on the largest current available size - 16Gb and I got it for $199.
They also have an 8GB version for about $100 for the lower budget minded. Word on the street is that there is soon to be a 32GB version which should clock in at a relatively reasonable $400ish.
The first thing I did after inserting the Expresscard was open Disk Utility and reformat it to HFS+ format (it came in Fat32). I then did a disk image of Leopard boot disk which is about 8GB. It only took a few minutes until it was done and popped up on my desktop just like any other drive would do. I then went to the Startup disk system preference and chose the Express card partition. Finally, I restarted. So started the fun things you can do with an Expresscard:
A Boot Drive -The restart seemed to take as much time as the hard drive overall but with noticeably faster "after login" speed. The machine was very quick even though very few programs were installed on the machine. I was able to watch Quicktimes without any problem. The machine seemed very quick. I don't have any benchmarks but I suspect that the battery used less power when the OS was running from a Flash Drive.
A Backup Drive - The 16Gb Expresscard is an awesome backup device. It worked great as a Tiger backup using Rsync and even better using Time Machine under Leopard. It isn't going to be able to save all of your music and photos if you have a big collection, but it is nice to know that my important docks are being backed up often and without my intervention.
A Parallels Image - The Solid state drive comes formatted with a 16Gb Fat32 partition on it, but if you are handy you can probably fit a Linux and a Windows partition on the little memory card. I simply moved a Parallels Disk image to the card. I can now take this image between my two MacBook Pros without even having to reboot.
Your Home Directory - The Expresscard file format may be the perfect storm between speed, size, cost and flexibility. As the size of these drives goes from 16 to 32 to 64 up to 128GB in the next few ears, it is possible that this is what you will take with you to work and school as your mobile home directory. The size is big enough that it could even be your mobile boot disk as stated in step 1.
Whatever the case these little guys are sure to be valuable, and could possibly be the next big thing...Here's a link to Amazon's store where I picked up my card which was very well priced.
     
mfbernstein
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Aug 16, 2007, 12:25 PM
 
Actually, the newer solid-state drives are looking a lot more exciting (write speeds are finally decent, read speeds are great, multiple simultaneous writes still kill it). Unfortunately, they're not getting much cheaper though.
     
   
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