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whm1974 wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

That just tells me that they have ExpressCard devices for sale, could be new stuff or old inventory.

Does the difference matter at this point?

I would say yes it does even though chances are that I will never use it.

Why do you care whether stuff is new or old inventory, if it does what you need? Since you run Linux, driver support is more likely to be decoupled from the manufacturer -- if there was ever decent Linux driver support for the device in question, there probably still is.

JBI, we have an RMS here.

The best thing you can do with ExpressCard is this!

I ran one of these because I needed four RS232 ports at one point - worked perfectly in that role, and was later repurposed with a quad NIC for a dirty temp server where it also worked beautifully.

There's a few types about, do recommend.

Captain Ned wrote:

JBI, we have an RMS here.

Who, me? I'm hardly RMS here.

As Churchill said, a fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Fellow T430 owner here. I never actually found a real use for my express card, though mSATA SSDs work as does an SSD in the optical bay with an adapter. For awhile, I was rocking three internal SSDs 'because I can'.

I could never find out if various Express Card to PCIe adapters would work with that laptop. Even if so, there are a few caveats to using them as they certainly are not hot swap.

I bought an ExpressCard wired NIC to repurpose an old laptop as a router using pfsense. I ended up not using it for anything beyond testing, but conceptually it worked great to add a 2nd ethernet for pfsense.

I always wanted an intel NIC expresscard, never happened, just a bunch of realjunk or other bleh chipsets, even the dual port one sucks.
Mini-pci-express actually has dual port i350 cards, obviously require a bracket and not meant for laptops.

Thunderbolt has various boxes for x4 3.0 which is pretty handy, but nothing so far tops some MSI laptops with x16 docks. Came out with haswell, got a broadwell update but nothing since.

I didn't know that this thread was still alive, but I thank you guys for your responses. Sorry I haven't been posting lately, but I was busy playing Stellaris for a while.