I've never used the Expresscard slot on my T61

It's true. I bought it in early 2008. The paperwork says "PC Card Slot and Express Card Slot" (Qnty 1). There's one relatively wide slot on the left side with two gray "buttons" that I guess when pushed eject one or the other cards.

What great and amazing things am I missing by not utilizing this slot? Is it so ancient that nothing will work in it these days? Is a slot this old positively glacial in speed or is the moral equivalent of USB 2.0 (or USB 3.0)?

I did a Google search and all the articles were kinda old so I'm just wondering if "modern" stuff that might utilitize a slot like this can't for some reason. Thanks.

 

You can do a eGPU, USB, eSata and all kind of stuff in it. But nothing "Really" amazing because anything will stick out. eGPU is kind of nice but I believe it is limited to PCI x1.0 .

It is something nice to play with (literally toy it around- the buttons, the space filler etc) when I was bored.

 

No hard drives (or SSDs) that are in Express Card formfactor? What was its intended use in the first place? Thanks for your reply.

 

forget the eGPU stuff, it barely shows any improvement and the work for it is quite a bit.

I use mine to plug in eSATA card that has 2 ports, so when I do HDD intense work the file transfer is awesome. Like I just cloned a back up HDD of my other laptop that has some 18GB worth of data on it, and everything went for about 6 minutes or so, fast. Shall I intend to do the same thing on my primary T61 that has 400GB+ worth of stuff in it - oh man that's when you really start to appreciate the speed, lol. Not to mention the use of SSDs (if you have some) as the DVD bay is limited to SATA 1 if you plan on using a HDD caddy there, i.e. 1.5Gbps where as over eSATA you get 2.5Gbps speeds (not 3Gbps due to the slot limitations itself). Of course you should be using the middletons BIOS to unlock SATA 2 speeds in your laptop.

or you could plug in a nice sound card in it - quite worth IMO as the stock one sucks as usual. I dont have one yet but I'll get to that part later.

or you could get a USB 3 card of course, but not too many devices out there that could benefit from it yet.

or just plug in card with some more USB 2 slots.

I think there are some card readers available as well. There is expresscard SSD also but it sux big time, avoid that.

 

At my last internship, our CAD HP Elitebook workstation notebooks had fiber directly to them via the express card slot. Yes...I would like to have direct fiber to my laptop too :-(

 

@Baiii: Not everything sticks out.

I have a flush eSata Expresscard in it. You can get them on eBay for like $8

I do have the idea that the Expresscard slot in the T61 should have been 1mm more recessed though. Flush on my T61 isn't as flush as on my W520.

 

Great post. i was wondering aobut the same thing, as my W530 came with one, and I was trying to find a use for it. Whats the consensus on and eSata vs a USB 3,.0 at this point?

 

For storage? >

That eSata beats USB 3.0 on every front. And that's not going to change either. It's inherent in the designs of eSata and USB that eSata is better for external storage.

(e)Sata is designed for storage devices, USB is just a universal bus. You will see much better responsiveness and faster throughput when using small files. And a lot less CPU consumption!

 

I figured eSata would be. i've seen some reports floating around though, saying USB 3.0 is a tad faster, hadn't seen any solid real world tests though. The power consumption though is a big factor though. Thanks.

 

those eSata cards (the small thin ones) suck big time. Back in the day I researched a lot and figured that the eSata card has to have the SiI3132 chipset to be fast and problem free. Mine is a 54mm StarTech one, but SIIG have also 54mm card with the same chipset.

if the slot is 54mm then better get 54mm cards, as the smaller ones would move sideways easily and would disconnect often.