Get a MPCIE to USB Card!

[dcfbf]

I think everyone who has owned an x61 has thought to put an msata drive into the right mpcie slot only to find out that the x61 does not support such an upgrade.
You may have felt sad, annoyed, disappointed, or even angry that the only easy internal storage option was the single 2.5" sata drive.

Well rejoice fellow lazy and incompetent people! There is a solution! An MPCIE to USB adapter!

With this simple 5 dollar part and a fit USB drive of your choice, even you who do not want to solder or do extensive modifications can have a second internal drive in your ThinkPad x61.

Now this all sounds great right? Easy upgrade to a secondary drive! Well after using it to run Debian 12 with KDE for about an hour, I have some thoughts:

The Good:
- Super easy upgrade and it fits quite well! There are visually no changes. This is literally a drop in upgrade with virtually no other setup or parts needed. Just plug and go!
- Very cheap, only costed me about 20 dollars for a secondary drive of 128gb
- If you have an small internal ssd and do not want to buy a new one and clone over all the data, getting this will allow for dual booting or extra storage without needing to do that
- Regular web browsing works fine, just don't go to heavy websites like youtube.
- There is nothing sticking out and you get to keep all of your external ports. Because this takes advantage of your already existing, internal, and unpopulated wwan card slot, it is a more elegant solution than just plugging in an external USB.

The Concerning:
- The palmrest does not fit 100 percent perfectly and now there are creaks when I press where the adapter card is.
- USBs unlike regular ssds are not really meant to have operating systems with swaps and constant read and writes happen on it. So even though they do use similar technology as regular ssds, they don't have anything like a Terabytes written rating so potentially inferior and therefore shorter-lasting NAND flashes are inside the drives.

The Bad:
- Slow, like really slow; this adapter adapts to USB 2.0 which when doing sudo apt upgrade netted me a peak speed of around 10mbps dropping as low as 700kbps
- SLOOOWWW, if you want to do anything that has been stored into the swap or just run an application, expect to wait at least 10 seconds before anything happens.
- You cannot run windows from this drive (not that you would really want to considering how slow it is) Because this is technically removable storage, windows will not install onto this
- Some x61's don't have the second mcpie slot. If that is you, then you are out of luck and cannot do this upgrade unless you solder on one yourself but at that point just do the other more complicated mods like trying to getting expresscard on the x61.
(Yes I said slow twice, I really needed to make the point that it is SLOW as molasses (not molasses during that time when a molasses container spilled molasses really fast everywhere, like regular molasses when you pour it out of a jar.))

Overall, this is a great part if you are lazy and incompetent like me and don't mind the slow speeds of a USB 2.0 drive.

Parts used:
MCPIE to USB
128GB PNY Fit USB Drive

[axur-delmeria]

It may be better to try fitting a USB M.2 2230 or 2242 enclosure inside the chassis.

[TPFanatic]

utilizing the PC Card slot with a CF card adapter may be an alternative for expanding storage. with storage having gotten so cheap the SATA bay is in most situations generous enough.

[my03]

I took the plunge already in January of 2024 and I am running OSX from it (+ W10 on the SDD)

https://i.ibb.co/nqgrM2Jx/x61.jpg

FORUM warning:
Picture(s) WAY too big, tags removed.
Please read the Forum Rules, especially Section 5: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=14339

Its not a speed-rocket unfortunately ( i would have wished that this machine would have had native support for mpcie ssd) but its no slouch either.

What i am trying at the moment is to upgrade the OSX to something more current (using opencore).

(also running a AX210 derivative on it for Wifi-6 support)

[axur-delmeria]

Its not a speed-rocket unfortunately ( i would have wished that this machine would have had native support for mpcie ssd) but its no slouch either.

The closest you can get is booting Clover from a USB flash disk to get NVMe boot, then somehow find an mPCIe to M.2 M-key adapter that sits low enough so that it doesn't hit the palmrest. IIRC the X200 and X201 WiFi and WWAN slots are soldered on the underside of the system board and have enough height clearance to make it work.

[dcfbf]

What i am trying at the moment is to upgrade the OSX to something more current (using opencore).

Nice! I'm glad you found the speeds on the usb drive to be bearable as an actual boot disk.
I do have to wonder how terrible it will be on a newer MacOS version.

From the time I made the post, I have reformatted the usb drive to become just extra storage since I'm running into space limitations from dualbooting win 7 and 10 on my 120gb ssd.
Before dual booting, the space was enough though.

[my03]

I did actually replace this internal USB/mpcie adapter with an SD/mpcie one as the usb one "sort of" made the top-part bulge a little bit. I ended up installing Linux Mint on the sd-card and now boot OSX by means of USB. Of course, OSX on this machine runs rather slow, so its more a POC than anything else (it natively also lacks SSE4.2 support that is required by later OSX versions, altough there are supposedly SW support in kext-format to circumvent this partially. I'm still trying things out in this regard )