SSD in ESata HDD caddy for laptop?

[sswilson]

Has anybody attempted this?

Rather than replace the 750G 5400 RPM drive in my laptop, I'm considering picking up a decent sized SSD with the thought of putting it into an esata caddy for booting from at home. I've already got both the caddy, and a 15' ESata cable.

Is this even feasable? How about if I cheaped out and just used a 1T 7200 RPM HDD (already own).... would I see any performance benefits to the External caddy over a 5400 RPM laptop drive?

edit: If I did decide to go this route, is there an easy way (free of course.... ;) ) of syncing certain folders (like game saves / docs) from the external drive to the internal which wouldn't affect performance?

[JimboToronto]

I'm not sure how you intend to connect the eSATA SSD to the laptop. Does the laptop have a built-in eSATA port? If so, does BIOS allow you to boot from it?

Most laptops only have single SATA connectors for their internal drives so the only feasible way to connect a second HDD or SSD is through an Expresscard eSATA controller. Unfortunately my testing has revealed that Expresscard bottlenecks transfers even worse than regular 1x PCIe (90MB/s writes and 120MB/s reads versus 100MB/s writes and 127MB/s reads).

Obviously there's not much advantage to be gained by choking an SSD down to HDD speeds.

A better route would be to install your boot SSD internally (assuming the port is SATA2 and not SATA1 which would limit the SSD to HDD sequential speeds anyway) and connect the slower bulk storage HDD through the slower Expresscard or even ridiculously slow USB2.

If you have a reasonably fast SATA SSD (Indilinx or faster) at your disposal, try connecting it externally and running a few benchmarks. That should help clarify matters.

[_dangtx_]

i say go for it, the transfer from the different interfaces could be a go or no go :)

[MacJunky]

Does your lappy have a hot pluggable optical drive? (like, with a latchy thingy on the bottom or something)
Because then you could just get a HDD caddy to fit your optical drive bay.

[ZZLEE]

Use Rj45 to a NAS. ?

USB 3 addin Card to NAS. ?

just ideas.

What is the Lap top and Specs of what we are playing with ?

Edit: NCIX.com - Canada's Premier Computer Store - Great Technology, Service and Selection. - in Canada