I want to upgrade my old Thinkpad. Currently there's still a 160 GB SSD, but just not enough. While looking around for larger SSDs, I also came across SDHC / SDXC cards, some of which have much higher capacities at comparatively cheap prices.
The thought came to me: Can't you just take an SD card as a primary drive? Eben instead of an SSD? Preferably as a boot partition for Windows 7 (Yes, Win7 is old, but I would like to stick to it) … On my system, larger amounts of data accumulate on the boot partition under My Documents and so… But. Also a very big Thunderbird profile with several mail accounts and thousands of e-mails (with attachments) of the last years, which I would like to migrate 1: 1 to the new system.
So: Is it possible that you simply do without a primary hard drive / SSD and run everything on an SD card? Is that stable? And if it is not "primary" about it, does it make sense, a large SDXC card permanently as a secondary (no physical extra space consuming) drive in the slot?
The interfaces of the memory cards are rather not designed for it.
SSDs are faster.
Thank you.
Theoretically, that works. However, the Thinkpad also has to play along.
I would not do that anyway (stability, speed, …). Especially not now, because the SSD prices are already deep in the basement.
Interesting thought. But against that speaks lack of security / durability and poor performance!
If you even get it installed, the SD card will break after a few months, no matter how expensive it was. SD cards are not suitable for something like that.
A decent SSD on a decent 6 Gbps SATA port can read and write 500 megabytes per second. Such values you will never reach with SD cards, rather 60-100 MB.
Theoretically, an SD card / USB stick should work. The problem is still that Windows must initialize its own USB drivers during the boot process. And loses contact with your own boot drive.
Although this is solved by setting up a so-called "WindowsToGo", it remains treacherous.
https://www-chip-de.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.chip.de/artikel/Windows-To-Go-Windows-auf-dem-USB-Stick-installieren_139922509.html?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&layout=amp&usqp=mq331AQEKAFwAQ%3D%3D#aoh=15680970786215&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=Von%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.chip.de%2Fartikel%2FWindows-To-Go-Windows-auf-dem-USB-Stick-installieren_139922509.html
With WindowsToGo a USB driver is "pushed" under the actual operating system. The technique was similar to that of a rootkit / windowsloader and vulnerable to attacks.
The second problem is the writing speed of SDs. Normalpreisge SDs have (USB3.0) a max. Write rate of 40MB / s, expensive come to something 100MB / s. This is the maximum speed designed for short writes like cameras and similar devices.
When writing a file over 250MB continuously, the write rate drops from 100MB / s to a leisurely 35 … For files from Meheren GB even under 20MB / s…
This is due to the compact design of this disk, since the memory chips can be very hot.
(An SSD with the same capacity has a 100 times larger cooling surface and this also needs cooling breaks at full load)
The 3rd restriction is the number of maximum write cycles, which is only a fraction of that of an SSD for SDs. This means that after one year as a "hard drive", half of its storage cells are likely to be "burnt out".
Conclusion, keep your hands off your idea. A 512 SSD is cheaper than a good SDHC with the same capacity.
