10 ms·
Testing a Cheap ExpressCard to NVMe SSD Adapter on My ThinkPad T430
- causality0 4y agoI still mourn the death of the pc card slot. I miss being able to store a Bluetooth mouse inside my laptop.
- neilv 4y agoYeah, my current daily driver has what looks like a dual-height PCMCIA/CardBus slots, but there's a divider in it (for 1 CardBus, 1 ExpressCard/54). For less frequently-used stuff stored in ThinkPad, such as USB adapters and cables occasionally needed on the road, I'm thinking make UltraBay drawer: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=thinkpad%20ultrabay%20hdd https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=thinkpad%20ultrabay%20h... Maybe someone's come up with a 3D-printed UltraBay storage design that's better.
- causality0 4y agoI'm surprised nobody's made some kind of folding mouse that would attach magnetically to a laptop.
- franga2000 4y agoMicrosoft has this cursed thing [0]. Although it's not magnetic and despite being the thinnest I've seen is still too bulky to just attach to the side, it would fit great in a PCMCIA-sized slot. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en/accessories/products/mice/arc-touch-mouse https://www.microsoft.com/en/accessories/products/mice/arc-t...
- robin_reala 4y agoI have a memory of HP selling one at some point for ExpressPort? Edit: looks like it was a 3rd-party product they bought in: https://daintlgroup.com/works-MogoMouse.html https://daintlgroup.com/works-MogoMouse.html
- amatecha 4y agoOh wait, what? Considering I'm using an X230 (and have many of them), which has an ExpressCard slot, this sounds very intriguing indeed. Well, other than the Bluetooth part, but the "mouse in a PC card" sounds awesome! Thanks for mentioning it -- now off to investigate! haha
- prmoustache 4y agoDon't. The ergonomy of such a mouse was so bad you were better off using a trackpad anyway.
- type0 4y agoYeah, can't even imagine how awful that would be. On the other hand Expresscard remote control is a good idea if you want to repurpose an old laptop to a media center
- russdill 4y agoThe coolest accessory was a Bluetooth flip phone that fit into the PCMCIA slot for charging.
- Melatonic 4y agoThat is just ridiculous and I love it
- resoluteteeth 4y agoExpresscard was like a pci express version of PCMCIA? I didn't even know that existed.
- paulmd 4y agoya it's like a 1-lane pcie 1.1 m.2 "cartridge" basically. Expresscard 2 gets you 1 lane of pcie 2.0. you can even use them to attach eGPUs... see the EXP GDC Beast lineup. Put a 6900XT on your vintage thinkpad laptop (there was recently a video of this with a desktop...) You can also play around with the M.2 slots on your desktop... those can be adapted to a pcie slot with a riser cable/PCB. Or I think there's little risers that use SAS to push it (needs a controller chip). Most PCIe is pretty fungible without much active conversion between the various physical formats, PCIe slots and OCP and m.2 and expresscard and oculink etc all are protocol-compatible and for some of them it's literally as simple as a PCB with some traces (like M.2 to PCIe and OCP to PCIe). Compared to USB and some of the other standards it's a massive success story imo.
- Sakos 4y agoI'm annoyed that we gave up on standardized modules like that. Especially now with modern technology, we could have far more modular systems that could last a whole lot longer than they used to.
- resoluteteeth 4y agoI think it's understandable considering that 1) most people probably prefer smaller/thinner laptops now, and 2) between m.2 wifi cards and thunderbolt there probably isn't that much demand for it Still, pc cards were pretty cool
- paulmd 4y agothunderbolt is janky as fuck compared to pcie as a whole though. intel's tb3 is not great and nobody besides apple ever managed to pass official certification, which functionally requires bug-correctness apparently. hopefully it eventually gets straightened out with third-party usb4 implementations.
- shortformblog 4y agoThunderbolt has basically replaced this use case, but some folks have done interesting things with ExpressCard. My favorite is the folks who have managed to successfully run eGPUs on 17-inch MacBook Pros via the slot. (The 17-inch MBPs have not been sold since 2011.) https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/egpu-on-macbook-pro-4-1-and-up-with-pcie-expresscard-slot.2135898/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/egpu-on-macbook-pro-4-1...
- black_puppydog 4y agothunderbolt on a laptop is always properly external, while this would be essentially internal once installed, no? Personally I have come to loathe all dongles on our super-slim nothing-included-noting-upgradable ultrabooks
- chpatrick 4y agoWell, there's Framework Laptop if you want upgradable "internals".
- dmm 4y agoThe Framework laptop expansion card system allows you to have internal, thunderbolt connected cards. I think it's an interesting compromise: https://frame.work/marketplace/expansion-cards https://frame.work/marketplace/expansion-cards
- zitterbewegung 4y agoYea it is achieved by having space for the cards and exposing a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface.
- ekianjo 4y agoAlso here on thinkpads (linux) https://boilingsteam.com/gaming-with-an-egpu-is-it-worth-it/ https://boilingsteam.com/gaming-with-an-egpu-is-it-worth-it/
- rzzzt 4y ago
- Scoundreller 4y ago> When copying files to the SSD, the temperature sensor reported a maximum of 60°C. Additional read operations in the form of an ZFS scrub hit 63°C, which was the maximum I observed during my quick testing. Dunno at what temperature the drive starts throttling itself, but I'd think a good idea would be to drop a dab of heatsink goop (and possibly some metal coins/washers held in place if it's a big gap) between the important bits of the SSD and the casing. It'll conduct heat out much better without the air interface. I can't tell if the SSD maker put a sticker on there, or a heat spreader.
- RedShift1 4y agoA heatsink pad would be less messier and you can get those in different heights, so no coins needed.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago> and possibly some metal coins/washers held in place if it's a big gap Please, no! Thermal pads exists exactly for this. They wouldn't be worse than a coin/washer covered in a "heatsink goop".
- wtallis 4y agoI don't think I've ever seen a NVMe drive with a warning temperature threshold below 70°C. Given the bandwidth limitations of ExpressCard, it would be difficult to get most consumer NVMe drives to reach even 3W power consumption. But even if you did get a drive hot enough to start throttling, it probably wouldn't slow down noticeably unless you were able to get it all the way up to the critical temperature (usually around 85°C) — a NVMe drive that's throttling mildly is still generally faster than PCIe 2.0 x1.
- jeffbee 4y agoI have no idea what this vendor has set the critical temperature to, but the Phison PS5013-E13 datasheet says it operates up to junction temperatures of 125°C. In general I would say the heat issue with SSDs is overblown.
- liketochill 4y agoT430s is my daily driver still
- ekianjo 4y agoan excellent machine. the cpu and gpu start to show their age a bit.
- bubblethink 4y agoThe GPU a lot. No hardware acceleration for any current video codecs. 100% CPU and fans on youtube.
- Lutzb 4y agoI wish there was a nice screen replacement for the t430s but otherwise the form factor is just right.
- raffraffraff 4y agoThe screen is shit. The touchpad is shit. But it's a great little machine for its time.
- Melatonic 4y agoI believe there are - theres some hackers in China that even release full on motherboard replacements with modern CPU's and everything
- btgeekboy 4y agoMine's not my main computer, but being a standard x64 on Windows computer with both a network jack and full-sized SD card slot, mine gets plenty of use as my hangar computer. It's plenty powerful for reading PDFs & wiring diagram spreadsheets, which I sync locally via Syncthing to/from my NAS. And the two aforementioned ports are necessary for updating my avionics, but pretty rare these days without extra dongles. And while it's old, the T-series is decently rugged, so it'll probably survive a fall, perhaps with superficial scratches. All in all, totally worth the couple hundred dollars I paid for it off-lease in something like 2015.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoI wonder if this might work on my old Dell Precision M4400 I've been tricking out for no reason. So far it's had its CPU upgraded to a QX9300 (Core 2 Quad), boot drive upgraded to an SSD, had a copper shim installed between its GPU and heatsink to dramatically improve thermals, and had an Intel Wifi 6 + Bluetooth 5 card installed by way of an adapter that fits into the laptop's WWAN slot. It's got both an ExpressCard and a PCMCIA slot that I've struggled to come up with good uses for, and an NVMe drive might fit the bill. With that in place it'd have crazy storage capacity with the ExpressCard slot, two 2.5" bays (one of which is hotswap) and an SD card slot. The thing is a real brick of a machine but it can't be faulted for lack of expandability.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago> I wonder if this might work on my old Dell Precision M4400 Why not? It's just PCIe bus. The only things is what you wouldn't be able to boot from it and what Core 2 is too slow to seriously push any decent NVMe drive. But as a storage it would be just fine. > I've been tricking out for no reason It has a sane keyboard layout (with all the keys FFS!), clitoris with TouchPad, 4 USB ports and can be used as a self defense weapon if the need arises. > I've struggled to come up with good uses USB3 card is a nice thing to have but you will have a hard time finding one on in PCMCIA variant.
- ethbr0 4y ago> Core 2 is too slow to seriously push any decent NVMe drive * Intel PM45 / ICH9M is too slow to seriously push any decent NVMe drive Pre-integrated IO controller, so PCIe would have been coming off the southbridge, no? Which looks like it's PCIe 1.1. Which would mean 4 GB/s max. (ceiling, assuming all of a 1x16 link gets linked up)
- justsomehnguy 4y ago10+ years ago I tested moving some (ancient at THAT time) Celerons[0] to SSD drives. It made absolutely no difference, because the CPU is too damn slow. My own rig was on A64 X2 4200+ (with no less than 8Gb of RAM at any time) for years, with Vista since 2008. I don't remember when I migrated it to SSD (perhaps ~2012-2014?) but I noticed a great improvement in QoL, though it wasn't instant. Years later, somewhere around 2016 I "upgraded" to G2010[1] and despite everything else (well except DDR2 => DDR3) were the same (including OS and the system drive on that SSD) I noticed performance increase in both boot-up and everyday operations. You still need a good IPC to actually push any meaningful amount of data. While OP's T9400 is not Presscot bullshit[2] it is still an ancient shrunk down Merom, ie just the firsts of the Core CPUs. > Which would mean 4 GB/s max And the memory is just 6.4GB/s max. Still, in 2022 this is probably the simplest way to add a decent amount of fast storage for a such ancient machine. [0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27116/intel-celeron-d-processor-335-256k-cache-2-80-ghz-533-mhz-fsb.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27116/i... [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/71071/intel-pentium-processor-g2010-3m-cache-2-80-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/71071/i... [2] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/35562/intel-core2-duo-processor-t9400-6m-cache-2-53-ghz-1066-mhz-fsb.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/35562/i...
- gorgoiler 4y agoThis post reminded me how much I always loved PCMCIA, as a standard. The hardware was the size of a candy bar. There was space for a big colorful sticker on the flat side. The insertion force had a very satisfying feeling. The all metal cases made them feel substantial and expensive. Big, colorful, tactile. They were the vinyl albums of the PC world.
- neilv 4y agoI'd noticed that, too. When I sold all my PCMCIA and CardBus cards, the set of them (excluding the plastic double-height RealPort cards) made a striking stack in my hand, of very compact modular functionality. It's almost tempting to collect them, like trading cards.
- joveian 4y agoI know what you mean, although I think it has been long enough that you forgot just how bad many of the connectors were (or you were tipped off and did the sensible thing and only got cards with a larger section outside the system with a full size connector). There seemed to be a common connector on 80+% of the cards that would break (no longer make full contact) in at most two years, if you were extremely careful.
- linmob 4y agoYes, a fun form-factor! The EOMA68 project tried to re-use it for a compute module [0], but sadly ran out of money before shipping. [0]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop
- RF_Savage 4y agoTbh it felt like EOMA68 ran out of money due to constant Yak shaving. For example, instead of sourcing a stock of the increasingly hard to get DDR memory chips, time and money was spent on designing a completely new 3d printer based on new mechanics for printing the laptop parts. No commercial printer was good enough and neither was any 3d printing service. Due to the time spent on thimgs like this more and more parts went obsolete and manufacturing became harder. Still waiting for my EOMA68-A20 card that runs Debian.
- holonsphere 4y agoThe best dev of my life was def spent hacking a way on a thinkpad. Best project i ever got to work on was a wireless network bootable pcmcia card. 10+ years too late. Idk if ill ever have the time to ingest myself into doing something similar on a new interface. :/
- rhim 4y agoUnfortunately, the AliExpress link is down, has anyone found an equivalent article?
- GauntletWizard 4y agoI just bought a PCIE NVME Expansion card. It makes obvious sense - It was like $13, because the card is electrically neutral, just serving as an extension of the PCIE lanes that my NVME will be using. My oldest server had a spare PCIE slot and no NVME ports. Easy enough installation.
- Katie69 4y ago[flagged]
- harvie 4y agoCan you boot from this?
- hddherman 4y agoFrom what I’ve heard, no, but I remember things like Clover being mentioned to get around that limitation.
- gsich 4y agoThe one from https://thinkmods.store https://thinkmods.store supports this via a mini SD card attached via USB, as the Expresscard also has USB pins. But I don't know if the creator actually has enough resources to make/ship those devices.
- bluedino 4y agoAhhh, the days when you could actually add things to laptops. It's probably good for me that I can't upgrade anything in my MacBook. I have always had a bad habit of mindlessly maxing things out (or at least using all the slots/ports). When I had my Lenovo T420, Micron had a sale on SSD's, so I purchased and installed both the mSATA and SATA drives that they offered. For $600 I now could carry every file I had, and didn't even need! Then one day, I saw a Wintec Expresscard SSD on a forum, for only $100! I then had another 256GB SSD to add to my laptop. I also stuck 16GB of RAM in that thing, since 8GB SO-DIMM's were so cheap at the time. Eventually I removed an SSD to use in another system and put a 2.5" 1TB HDD in there for more storage, and just ran the OS off the faster mSATA drives. In more recent times, you can add multiple drives to the workstation machines like the Lenovo P50, and I currently have a Lenovo T490 with two drives in it. However, you need to buy the right cables and drive adapter depending on if you want M.2 or 2.5" SATA drives, and only a small amount of M.2 SSD's will work in the other, shorter slot if you want dual drives. And yes, the T490 has a very un-used 32GB of RAM.
- Melatonic 4y agoMy old T420 has had an ExpressCard adapter to add USB 3.0 for ages. At the time I added it the laptop was already old and had been purchased used from this software engineer Russian kid in SF. He sold it to me for 250$ cash and had already upgraded it to 12GB of RAM and an SSD internally (which were cutting edge for the time). I believe he was maybe running OSX on it because part of the reason it was cheap was that it had a permanent imprint of a giant apple sticker on the cover (since removed). He had bought it in Russia (so Russian hybrid printed keyboard which always made it a cool party trick but still easy to type english on). It still works to this day. I was able to easily take it apart years later, redo the cooling paste, upgrade the wifi card, and add that USB 3.0 adapter. It also has an eSata port which means it works great for quickly reading bare drives (with an external adapter you plug a HDD into like a damn SNES Cartridge). Dedicated GPU and i7 means it easily even runs a lot of games as well and run up to 3 plus displays. Still my favourite laptop keyboard ever and I used it for about 8 years and multiple jobs. Now it occasionally plays totally completely legal content to my TV or is an emulator machine with a few bluetooth adapters to DS4 controllers. edit: Based on reading more about these adapters this is definitely super cool but also (functionally) not that amazing for these thinkpads specifically. One of the big downsides of ExpressCard is that it is easily removed (you basically just press in on the adapter and it clicks and then pops out a bit) which means I regularly used to accidentality just barely detach the connection between my USB 3.0 card and the laptop. Obviously for a HDD this is not good. The other thing is that since it is limited to a single PCI-E lane (basically the equivalent speed of a fast SATA SSD) you might as well just use one of the SATA ports in the laptop in the first place. You can of course replace the default drive with a nice SSD and probably get something of similar speed or simply remove the CD drive and put an SSD in its place (there are adapters made for this). And if you are willing to forego internal WiFi and use a USB WiFi adapter there is also another mSATA slot internally that can house yet another (small) SSD. On my T420 at least this means that the laptop can house 3 HDD's without using this adapter. That being said the idea of having 4 separate SSD's in a laptop from 2011 that never even came with ONE is pretty damn cool!