I looked through my old laptops and found a Toshiba A100 that does in fact have a combined PCMCIA and ExpressCard slot. I had previously thought that it was just a standard double height dual PCMCIA slot but you can actually see a small moulded label saying "EX" next to the top slot and "CB" next to the bottom slot.
Awesome! Surprise surprise!
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Anyway i did some tests using Radky's Dpup Sretch 7.5 as that has kernel 4.1.48 and i figured that should be new enough to recognise the adapter and sure enough it does!
Here is a pic of the adapter in place, with a USB3 stick inserted.
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Here are my notes:
- The adapter must already be plugged in before booting. Does not seem to be hot swappable.
- Take care to keep pressure on the adapter when removing usb sticks from the adapter or else the adapter will pull out of the slot before the stick pulls out of the adapter. Then you would have to reboot to reset the adapter.
- I found that data transfer was approximately twice as fast going through the USB3 adapter as it was through my other usb ports. Nice gain of speed!
- Interestingly enough i discovered that the data transfer to a FAT32 partition was twice as fast as transfer to an EXT2 partition. (so that's a minimum 4x gain). Nice to know.
- other sticks or other types of data transfer may be even faster. The packet blurb says up to 10x faster than USB2.
Bear in mind that Linux drivers never give the same maximum speed as Windows drivers (in my experience anyway).
Now there is one bit of information that i am really pleased to have discovered during my testing - although it may be irrelevant to anyone else.
- If the USB3 stick inserted into the adapter is formatted as Linux-Swap then the system will detect it during boot and will be able to use it as swap. I did not really expect this to work because many PCMCIA style storage adapters cannot be used in this way (just as SD adapters cannot be detected as swap pre-Boot).
Why is this valuable?
- because it means that a low RAM PC can have a fast swap partition added via USB3. (especially useful if you do not have an internal HDD or do not want to re-partition an internal HDD)
But wait there's more!
- When booting a puppy from CD the system will create a "personal storage space" that matches the size of the PC RAM.
In a PC with very little RAM this can be quite limiting until you create an expandable personal storage file somewhere on disk.
However - many of us never create personal storage files (or folders) because of various risks of corruption or retention of malware etc.
This is where the USB3 swap can be very useful - If the adapter and usb stick are plugged in before you boot then Puppy will add the size of the swap partition ONTO the RAM total - giving a massive personal storage space!
In the case of my 1GB Toshiba Satellite A100 the additional swap partition took it from a relatively unuseable PC to one that is now very useable! I can do massive copies of big files, and also video processing or large iso remastering without running out of personal storage space.
(What i learnt from this process is that USB swap can be quite useful if "swapped on" during normal running (although this extra swap space will NOT be added to the personal storage space unless plugged in BEFORE BOOT) - but can be way more useful if plugged in before booting. The fact that "personal storage space" can be hugely increased by booting with USB3 swap is great news for me. This info will solve some issues i have previously noted in my systems. Yay!)
So all in all it looks as if a USB3 express card can be very useful.
Thanks!