Expresscard SSDs?

[Makhaira]

Ok, I suspect I'm looking to have my cake and eat it, but here goes...

I've currently got a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop, with the standard 250Gb HDD in there, and a DVDRW in the module slot.

What I'd like to do is to get a marked performance boost, since going from my SSD main machine to the 5400rpm laptop is quite painful (although the rest of the specs are respectable). The problem I have is that I don't want to lose the DVDRW to put a drive in the module slot, and I don't want to fork out for a huge SSD.

So in my quest to keep my 250Gb drive, and my DVDRW, I've been looking at ExpressCard SSDs. The question is, does anyone have experience with these, and how does their performance compare to conventional drives? I know they will be worse, I'm just wondering by how much.

If anyone has other cunning suggestions about how to achieve this, I'd be more than open to suggestions!

Thanks.

 

[DeadMan]

They are great for storage but are nothing in comparison to normal SSD's as they have to run over a very bandwidth limited PCIE x1 lane.

 

[Makhaira]

Cheers. How do they compare to 5400 or 7200rpm SATA drives?

At the end of the day I'll take any significant performance gain that I can get, since the drive really is a performance bottleneck for general desktop multitasking use.