Wintec FileMate SolidGO 3FMS4D24M-WR 24GB ExpressCard 34 with Mini USB 2.0 External Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: Fast, an order of magnitute faster than most flash drives, but not as fast as my OCZ Vertex internal drive. Great product. Does not come partitioned, likely the reason the previous reviewed could not get it to work! I partitioned in Win 7 fine. Reads 115 Writes ~65.

Cons: Wish it were larger

Pros: None

Cons: Product does not work. Attempted to use on WindowsXP and Windows7, using USB interface and ExpressCard interface. The ssd is not accessible.
P.S. Ordered product was shipped to me from "RMA Warehouse". It does not appear right.

Pros: This thing is FAST safari launches before the dock icon can even bounce once, itunes loads twice as fast, same for mail and ical. Installing this card could not be easier just slide it in. I use this as the boot drive running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and use a Seagate momentus 7200.4 for itunes library and virtual machine. But using the solidgo as a boot and application drive makes a world of difference.

Xbench score for Solidgo
Disk Test 77.90
Sequential 100.44
Uncached Write 120.43 73.94 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 102.98 58.27 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 57.57 16.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 225.20 113.18 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 63.62
Uncached Write 18.78 1.99 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 147.62 47.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 953.92 6.76 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 555.79 103.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Cons: The write speeds are not amazing (see other thoughts), also its kinda pricey for just 24 gigs considering I got the seagate momentus 7200.4 500 gig drive for under $100. Also there are a lot of reviews stating that these things fail down the road, and I have only had this installed for a week so I have now way of knowing what the future holds. But I could never go back to a conventional drive after this experience.

Other Thoughts: This replaced the seagate momentus 7200.4 as the boot drive the xbench for seagate
Disk Test 52.42
Sequential 113.24
Uncached Write 168.27 103.32 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 153.04 86.59 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 56.00 16.39 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 200.40 100.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 34.10
Uncached Write 10.76 1.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 166.54 53.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 84.92 0.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 151.34 28.08 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Where the solidgo really shines is the last two categories the uncached read makes a huge difference for boot time and launching apps, it really is a night and day difference. I bought the solidgo because I was finding that the seagate would get bogged down while running multiple virtual machines. If you want to speed up your macbook pro GET THIS NOW, my almost two year old mbp feels brand new again.

Pros: Quiet, reliable, unobtrusive.

Popped the drive into my 3-year-old MacBook Pro 17". I modified the system boot scripts to use this drive as a swap device. I've been using it for several months with no problems. It doesn't interfere with putting the system to sleep.

I have no problems whatsoever with heat. I'm sweeping an infrared thermometer over the case as I write this, and I see that the area around the drive is a few degrees warmer than a similar area on the opposite side. But there are other spots on the case that are warmer. I don't notice the fan running any more than it used to.

Cons: It's a moderately fast swap device, but it's not going to change your world. My computer is somewhat faster when paging to this SSD, but that's all. (I don't necessarily blame the SSD. There are *many* factors at play here.)

Other Thoughts: Using dd if=/dev/zero of=testFile b s=40960 count=100000, I measure write speeds of 60-70MB/second. (The two letters b and s above don't really have a space between them; I added it because NewEgg won't allow me to put those two letters together in a review.) This depends strongly on block size, filesystem efficiency, device drivers, kernel buffering, etc, so don't take it as gospel. It's just my estimate of the steady-state write throughput rewriting an existing file using a large blocksize.

Using dd to read from the raw disk device, measure data rates from 90-130MB/sec.

Pros: I bought this about 8 months ago and use it for my main partition on my laptop. I am very happy with this drive. The speed is fantastic. It does get a little warm but I've not noticed any drop in battery life. It worked under Ubuntu without loading anything extra.

Cons: It can slow down with too many active files but I've only experienced this once during a system upgrade.

Other Thoughts: I wish I would have gotten the 48GB version.

Pros: Excellent speed for read and write. Runs cool. Fit's my MacBook Pro perfectly.

Cons: A little pricey, but all fast SSDs are for now.

Pros: Read and write speed is as advertised.

Cons: 1) Runs hot, about 40C idle and can climb pretty high if used heavily.
2) Readyboost for Vista does not work with this SSD if using the ExpressCard slot, but will work if using the USB connection. Strange but might be my laptop's problem.
3) Also, some laptops may have trouble detecting. I had to reboot the laptop with the ssd already plugged in the expresscard slot for it to work. Otherwise, it will not detect for some strange reason, but no big deal, at least it works.

Other Thoughts: Dollar/Gigabyte is still very high for SSD.

Pros: I put this drive in my macbook pro. I installed osx on it, and now my computer runs much faster than it did using the internal hard drive. It completely boots in 23 seconds, and programs seem to open instantly. The whole computer seems more responsive.

Cons: Generates a fair amount of heat, but not a big issue.

Other Thoughts: amazing drive, i would definitely recommend it.

Pros: super fast, read speed is as advertised - got 120MB/sec using dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null; did not test write speeds
plug-n-play with Linux - Ubuntu Jaunty recognizes the drive without problems and is able to boot from it
The drive snugs neatly into the expresscard slot wihtout protruding at all (ok, maybe 1/2 mm out) I keep it plugged at all times and boot Ubuntu from it
ubuntu boot time is now super-fast ~10-15 seconds, much faster than with old 7200RPM fujitsu harddrive
package installation, application startup (firefox/openoffice) is also very noticeably faster

Cons: if you expect to also get longer battery life, forget it - this drive generates a LOT of heat => high power consumption, could be even higher than traditional spinning hard drive.
this is not an issue for me, since my battery life sucks anyways, and this is not something I expect from a drive at this price. if you want speed AND power savings, shell out the cash and get an Intel X25 ssd

Other Thoughts: great drive to stick in your spare expresscard slot and give a dramatic performance boost to your system!

keep your existing laptop SATA drive for extra storage where you can keep your music, video and other (mostly media) files, for which you cannot afford the space in the SSD and which do not benefit from the fast read and seek times of SSDs anyways.

if you have a 7200rpm drive which is noisy (like mine is) and you use Ubuntu (like I do), turn on the power management for the drive so it spins down even when your laptop is plugged it by editing this file:

/etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf

I set NOLM_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=15 in the above file to let the drive spin-down after 15 seconds when not accessed.

now my laptop is virtually noiseless (and super-fast) at most times

Pros: ExpressCard PCI-e interface. This is long overdue. KIt runs circles around the USB ExpressCard SSD's. Its performance is pretty fast as well

Cons: Did have to download the Jmicron RAID controller software from filemate to get this to work

Other Thoughts: On a laptop, the thing to do is get a SLC main drive for the fast writes for your cache, temp, and page files. As SLC drives have limited capacity, but this drive for your program files and static data. (I am not complaining about the write speed of this drive.) But the combination of the two means blazing performance