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Finally, a use for the ‘useless’ port on my MacBook Pro

Aug 09

PhilTechnology ExpressCard, Hard disk, HDD, Mac, MBP, SDD, Solid State 4 Comments

I am fine with USB sockets, I hook up a 7 port hub and hang disk drives, a printer, scanner, iPod, iPhone and digital camera off of it. I even have a use for the Firewire port on my MacBook Pro (hereafter, mostly, referred to as MBP), that’s where my video camera goes. But there is a little trapdoor on the left side of my Mac that has puzzled me for a while. I knew it replaced the PCMCIA card slot that my old PowerBook had, and I actually used that all the time as a Compact Flash card reader.

But this new little trapdoor on the MBPs apparently opens into what is known as an ExpressCard slot. No, I hadn’t heard of it either! And, it would appear, Apple have given up on it fairly quickly, with the current iteration of the MBP now having a more obviously useful SD card slot.

Actually, the SD card slot is not that useful to me personally. My DSLR (the Canon EOS 400D) uses CompactFlash cards, requiring a separate card reader, which is another thing I hang off that USB hub I mentioned earlier.

However, today I finally got around to listening to Episode 211 of the always informative and really great fun MacGeekGab (MGG). If you like to get at all Geeky about the Mac, and you do not listen to this show, you are missing out big time. Subscribe to it in iTunes NOW! I really, really enjoy listening to this podcast and it has saved my Mac bacon many times, I love it, thanks Dave and John.

Anyway, in this episode of the Mac Geek Gab (and in others), Dave and John discussed the use of the ExpressCard slot with an SSD drive. A listener had contacted them to suggest using the SSD (fast access, no disk spinning up and down) as the boot drive for the Mac OS and all the applications. The listener had a 48GB(!) drive in the ExpressCard slot, and this gave him fast OS and Application start up times, whilst using the MacBook Pro’s internal hard drive for storing files, iTunes library, etc.

My head is spinning at the potential for this. Especially as I am a keen (but struggling) amateur photographer, so my iPhoto and Lightroom libraries are massive and not getting any smaller, and I am constantly fighting to retain the ‘10% free disk space’ holy grail on my 120GB internal drive.

In the MGG episode they mentioned the planned production of a 256GB version of this drive, which is going to be very expensive (I think they said about $900 or about £540), almost the cost of a new 13 inch MBP! I have just checked Crucial’s website and the 256GB 2.5″ version is £405. This isn’t the same as the ExpressCard version as far as I know, so we will have to wait and see on the pricing for those.

All of this is moot though, because I am not financially in a position to put diesel in my car for the rest of the month, let alone consider this kind of purchase, but the potential for this is fantastic for day-to-day use of the MBP. 256GB of fast ‘Flash’ SSD memory, in addition to the internal drive, is exciting this particular Mac Geek.

I am really looking forward to the development of these drives and hopefully the tumbling prices over the next few years while my MBP is still in service. I will be watching their development closely.

By the way, in researching this post (yes, I did do some research) I found a website all about ExpressCard development news. Check it out if you’re interested, here.

That’s all, I just wanted to share this while I was still thinking about it. If you read this far, Wow! and thank you.