Thinkpads Forum

These SSD's are mini-PCIe format so should fit the slots under the keyboard. Has anyone here tried them out or know of any websites that have tried them out in normal laptops rather than the Asus EEE type computers they were built for?

adrianaitken wrote:These SSD's are mini-PCIe format so should fit the slots under the keyboard. Has anyone here tried them out or know of any websites that have tried them out in normal laptops rather than the Asus EEE type computers they were built for?

I am interested in this as well. There are both MLC and SLC variants in sizes from 16 - 64GB sold on eBay (not Buffalo ones).

they look way too long to properly bolt down in an X6x chassis.   besides, how would you flag the card as a boot device?

I was thinking more as a 'D:' drive. The ones I seen are about 1/3 the price of SATA SSD's.
But good question on how does a computer recognise a mini-PCIe SSD as a bootable drive !!

adrianaitken wrote:I was thinking more as a 'D:' drive. The ones I seen are about 1/3 the price of SATA SSD's.
But good question on how does a computer recognise a mini-PCIe SSD as a bootable drive !!

The performance of those internal SSD-cards is not very good (if I were to use one as a boot device I would go for a SLC-based one).

Thinking of regular desktop systems, the mini-PCIe card could present itself to the system as a disk controller card, with one disk attached.

However, I have a vague memory that you had to select if you wanted to boot from internal controller or external controller, when you had additional disk controllers in a desktop machine. This option obviously will not be available in a laptop. So, you could end up a few scenarios:

1. The SSD-card will always be a non-boot disk (interesting if you want unobtrusive additional storage with excellent read random access performance in your system)

2. The SSD-card "hijacks" the boot order and puts itself as the boot disk to the system and since you cannot select which controller to boot from, you are not happy (unless you wanted to boot from the card).

3. The same as 2 but that the boot-order options somehow gives control over the boot order to the user.

jketzetera, the SSD mini-PCIe is designed for the ASUS type netbooks so it should be bootable !!!!
As for extra peformance, I've already got a 32Gb SSD SATA as my 'main' drive, the only moving parts on my laptop at the moment is the fan and the mouse nipple - everything else is bolted down

adrianaitken wrote:jketzetera, the SSD mini-PCIe is designed for the ASUS type netbooks so it should be bootable !!!!

bootable by ASUS' BIOS, yes, but not necessarily bootable by the thinkpad's BIOS.   in fact, i'd be surprised if the X61 recognizes anything but a turbo memory or WWAN card in that second slot.   i once tried a lenovo UWB card in the TM/WWAN slot of a T61p and it didn't even show up in the device manager.

erik wrote:

adrianaitken wrote:jketzetera, the SSD mini-PCIe is designed for the ASUS type netbooks so it should be bootable !!!!

bootable by ASUS' BIOS, yes, but not necessarily bootable by the thinkpad's BIOS.   in fact, i'd be surprised if the X61 recognizes anything but a turbo memory or WWAN card in that second slot.   i once tried a lenovo UWB card in the TM/WWAN slot of a T61p and it didn't even show up in the device manager.

I guess that this is the part where Zender and his wonderful BIOS:es come to the rescue.

Dummy question here: I assume this is an issue for the X61s because I think the only mini-PCIe adapter in the X60s is for the wireless card? I believe teh X61s has an adapter for that memory booster for the hard drive?

I would seriously fear these cards use miniPCIe USB connection... which means it's not worth considering, if you want things like speed, low power-consumption, ... but I might be wrong, couldn't find specs.

As for ThinkPad's miniPCIe slots, it's always worth trying to tape pin 20 / disable pin, because the system might turn the card off, in a way that it does not even report to the system.

Zender wrote:I would seriously fear these cards use miniPCIe USB connection... which means it's not worth considering, if you want things like speed, low power-consumption, ... but I might be wrong, couldn't find specs.

I think that you are thinking of the expresscard interface, which features both USB and PCI-E interface (and it is up to the expresscard itself, which interface to use).

As far as I understand, the internal mini-PCI-E slots do not give access to the USB-interface but only the PCI-E interface. Thus, the SSD:s you plug into a PCI-E interface are really PCI-E-based SSD:s.

MiniPCIe does provide USB connection, it's basically the same as ExpressCard. I've seen pin designations and also know that WWAN cards are USB ones.

Edit: sorry, the message is a bad example of "I know it so it's true". So here you can see the pinout and find USB D+ and D- (USB data pair). There's no +5V USB power, because the device ought to report as self-powered and use 3.3V or 1.5V provided as a part of PCIe.

I stand corrected .