3 ms·

Nicely looking idea. Not sure about the benefit though. SSD can be fitted in ThinkPad in several ways already 1) swap internal HDD 2) use the optical drivebay,

Nicely looking idea. Not sure about the benefit though. SSD can be fitted in ThinkPad in several ways already 1) swap internal HDD 2) use the optical drivebay, needs a caddy 3) attach M2 SSD instead of WWAN card (this option is slower) 4) attach externally via eSATA (with adapter cable) All of the options above are bootable (not sure about eSATA, but can test). One more option is nice, of course, though not sure that booting off ExpressCard SSD could be directly supported by the BIOS. In my experience, the most demanded mod was HDMI adapter for DisplayPort, just to attach an occasional larger screen/TV.

Y-Bopinator 7y ago
DisplayPort and HDMI are two different competing standards.
numpad0 7y ago
Those older ThinkPads predate M.2 standard and since M.2 is longer than mSATA/mPCIe they simply don’t fit in case they needed a PCIe based storage.
- chx 7y ago
  > M.2 is longer than mSATA There are 42mm long M.2 drives and as all M.2 cards, they are 2mm wide. The largest 2242 SATA drives are 1TB from such reputable brands as Kingspec and Dogfish and I strongly recommend avoiding them like the plague. I'd stick with the Transcend MTS 430S at 512GB, it's the first SSD in such a size with a DRAM cache, launched last year. (At least the first retail, no idea what goes on with industrial SSDs.) Full height Mini PCIe cards are 30×50.95 mm. You can indeed buy an msata to 2242 adapter and it's cheap as dirt because it is completely passive, just the PCB with the right edge connector with the M.2 key B connector mounted on top. Zero electronics necessary. It's just SATA. For the sake of completeness, I must note some newer 2242 drives are key M / NVMe / PCI Express and I haven't seen such an adapter yet. The Sabrent 2TB Rocket is the largest 2242 SSD I am aware of and it's key M.
LeifCarrotson 7y ago
This hooks directly to the PCIe bus, so you can boot from an NVMe drive on 2008-2013 era ThinkPads that have no other PCIe exposed. The internal HDD/optical/WWAN M2 interfaces are all SATA-only.
rasz 7y ago
Yes, its slower than ordinary SATA 3.0. Testing similar converters on T410 yielded <200MB/s from fast SSD. In theory on something like x230 you have 1x Pcie 2.0 = 500MB/s, while SATA 3 is 600MB/s.
MrGilbert 7y ago
> Nicely looking idea. Not sure about the benefit though. The ExpressCard slot on my x230 is completely unused ever since. But storage... Oh boy, I always need more storage.

Y-Bopinator 7y ago

DisplayPort and HDMI are two different competing standards.

numpad0 7y ago

Those older ThinkPads predate M.2 standard and since M.2 is longer than mSATA/mPCIe they simply don’t fit in case they needed a PCIe based storage.

chx 7y ago
> M.2 is longer than mSATA There are 42mm long M.2 drives and as all M.2 cards, they are 2mm wide. The largest 2242 SATA drives are 1TB from such reputable brands as Kingspec and Dogfish and I strongly recommend avoiding them like the plague. I'd stick with the Transcend MTS 430S at 512GB, it's the first SSD in such a size with a DRAM cache, launched last year. (At least the first retail, no idea what goes on with industrial SSDs.) Full height Mini PCIe cards are 30×50.95 mm. You can indeed buy an msata to 2242 adapter and it's cheap as dirt because it is completely passive, just the PCB with the right edge connector with the M.2 key B connector mounted on top. Zero electronics necessary. It's just SATA. For the sake of completeness, I must note some newer 2242 drives are key M / NVMe / PCI Express and I haven't seen such an adapter yet. The Sabrent 2TB Rocket is the largest 2242 SSD I am aware of and it's key M.

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

This hooks directly to the PCIe bus, so you can boot from an NVMe drive on 2008-2013 era ThinkPads that have no other PCIe exposed. The internal HDD/optical/WWAN M2 interfaces are all SATA-only.

rasz 7y ago

Yes, its slower than ordinary SATA 3.0. Testing similar converters on T410 yielded <200MB/s from fast SSD. In theory on something like x230 you have 1x Pcie 2.0 = 500MB/s, while SATA 3 is 600MB/s.

MrGilbert 7y ago

> Nicely looking idea. Not sure about the benefit though. The ExpressCard slot on my x230 is completely unused ever since. But storage... Oh boy, I always need more storage.