It's 2011 Who uses their expresscard/34 slot

[OneMike]

I'm thinking about getting a card reader. I don't see much else use for it at this point.

 

[dime21]

Not being sarcastic, just wanted to know what the current uses are and if anyone can't live without it. I ordered a BTO 2011 17" and was a little bummed to lose the sd card slot but am intrigued as to what I may have gained. All the express card threads are pretty old and don't really address why a high end machine that was just refreshed days ago saw it fit to keep this tech. Is this tech dead? Are new developments coming? Or is this just a tide over until thunderbolt peripherals outweigh esata express card adapters?

card readers, ssd's, sound cards, storage interfaces (esata, firewire), wwan cards, legacy port cards, even secondary video cards. there's all kinds of stuff out there.

 

[Bubba Satori]

In the past, it was the only way to get fast external storage (eSATA). Now that Thunderbolt is here, I don't see that much use for ExpressCard. Offers more features than the SD card slot though

Yeah, it's great to take advantage of all the Thunderbolt peripherals out there. Nothing's available for SD or EC, anyway. The future is tomorrow.

 

[Awjvail]

I have honestly never used an Expresscard slot. Ever.

Actually, that's a lie. The expresscard slot on my old HP DV5 doubled as a storage slot for the remote

 

[alphaod]

I would love the ExpressCard slot instead of an SD card slot; I use CF mostly for my cameras and such, so having a fast UDMA adapter would be better than having to carry around a UDMA FW device.

 

[mikeheenan]

I have the 2010 MBP, and use the Expresscard esata every now and then. but now that I've upgrade to an SSD hd, and soon will convert the optical bay to a 750gb drive, I probably will not use the expresscard as much to transfer movies anymore.

 

[m85476585]

Thunderbolt and Expresscard are both based off PCIe. The difference is that Expresscard is a widely adopted industry standard, but Thunderbolt is something newly developed by Intel with essentially no adoption at this point.

 

[wildgiles]

Video

I used esata and get 100MB/sec transfers for video backups and downloads. Another huge thing is downloading off of sony's SxS cards, which fit perfectly into the express port this is 4X faster than transferring SxS media through the USB card reader. I found the express port to be a must for all the high end video editing I was doing on my macbook pro.

 

[johnnyturbouk]

I have a USB3.0 Expresscard. I did not expect to see Thunderbolt so soon. I wouldn't have gotten one if I did.

out of interest which expresscard 34 usb3 did you get

was it the lace: if yes, i assume you have a lacie usb3 hdd?

 

[kaltmond]

I use the expresscard slot everyday for Echo Indigo DJx, maybe a RME HDSPe later, shame no xpress slot on new 15" MBPs.....

 

[thejadedmonkey]

I put an SD card reader into mine, sometimes.

Otherwise, nothing. I've wanted a video card for it, but I could find one good enough...

 

[yoak]

I use it constantly to dump footage from my HD camera that records to SxS cards. They go straight in the slot and offload up to 8x realtime. 6 times faster than using USB.
I for one was very upset that they removed it from the 15.
SD card slot is very limited. I have an adaptor for that to use with my express slot

 

[thenard]

Any good solution for expresscard/34 PCI to USB adapter

i'm on a new macbook pro 15", and not having an express card is definitely a pain. i need it to run a matrox mxo2 mini (for streaming purposes), and i'm concerned that the adapters on the market won't be able to handle that sort of workload.

anyone had success with an adapter they can share?

 

[NewportTom]

Express34 Card Slot

I use mine for a Sili Image RAID Card (2 port) with an Addonics Port Multiplier (1 to 5) to run a two disk Mirrored RAID, two HDD enclosures and a Plextor DVD burner on my Macbook Pro. I would be excited to fnd a Thunderbolt to ESATA adaptor then I might update the Macbook. The raid card acts as a controller taking the load off of the Dual Core Micro P. Set the same set up for the wife. If I add a second Addonics multiplier and the drives I can set up a dual 4 disk spanned RAID/Mirrors with to Spare Backup drives but... Maybe later for that one.

Peace

Tom