I bought a generic adapter on eBay for my x230 and it just worked. Maybe your cable or adapter are broken?

I am using Debian 7.

That's strange. I also bought a Crucial 256GB SSD drive, it fit perfectly. Would you mind sharing the exact reference of the one you got?

Here's mine:
Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD3 mSATA 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148613

This also worked for the X230 running Trisquel (based on Ubuntu 12.04LTS), thank you.

I noticed the brightness indicator doesn't move accordingly, though. Do you notice the same? Is there something else to fix this? It's not exceedingly annoying, just not making this trick perfect

After a few days using a new X230 I noticed the expresscard has a metal fram inside which is now slightly bent, thanks to the palm rest pressure (!?). I opened its door when I noticed there wasn't a plastic holder as in other brand systems I've had (Dell, for example). I will be calling Lenovo to tr...

The ExpressCard slot is there, available for future use even if you don't order one of the smart card readers.

I stand corrected.

I don't use VMware and I don't plan to use VB on this system, so yes, this matters only if you're going to use KVM for now. When and if VB (or VMWare) support this, it may be important to you. Here is the bug report for VB, BTW:
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/5252

The only battery that will not stick out is the 4 cell.

When I compared all the features based on the Intel specs site , the main difference I noticed was the 3210M does not support Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) This is important for fast operation of virtual machines when using VirtualBox or KVM (I use GNU/Linux). Unless you p...