Neat Cheap Upgrade

[jronald]

Most of you know I run a Z61t nicely upgraded with the TI lid, 3 gig of memory, a 120 gig SSD, W7 ultimate and a 2.0 CPU. Im not a huge fan of large HDDs, and in fact the largest I own is 160 gig. With roughly 60 gig of music on the Z I was running out of space so I did a little research and spotted this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/400558384797?ss ... 1439.l2649
For less than $10.00 its hard to go wrong with my plan.
The Z series have Dual Wireless card ports for WiFi and Cellular service. One was left open when I built the machine. Using the Middleton Bios, my plan was coming together.

I then sourced this
http://www.ebay.com/itm/360917185566?ss ... 1439.l2649
Because of the casing I needed to crack it out of the plastic shell, but it does fit under the keyboard snuggly. I wrapped it with some surgical splint tape, because thats what I had at the time and reassembled the whole thing.

Moved the music off of the HDD and freed up tons of space for less than $20. Pretty good upgrade!

Ron. .

[RealBlackStuff]

Neat!
If you need more space, try this:
remove the PCMCIA cage, get a small USB hub (4 ports or so) and connect that to your internal USB port.
Then put in a few more USB flash drives...

[jronald]

I try to keep my mods invisible, but that would be a way to add tons of space.

Ron

[jronald]

Ok, I was pulling music off of the NAS, sometimes it was bothersome with unidentified glitches...never really got all of them worked out.

With the 60 plus gigs on board its there! Fire up Clementine, it loads and updates instantly and plays. Me like a!


Ron

[emeraldgirl08]

Well done! 60gb is a lot of storage space for music! Food for thought

[jronald]

I dont know, its only @ 55gigs now..............


Ron

[rkawakami]

Beside the additional cost, was there any reason why you didn't go with a Mini PCI-e to SDHC adapter? That way you wouldn't need to crack the flash memory PCB out of the thumb drive case. Something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/221196546317 There's even a dual Micro SDHC adapter: http://www.ebay.com/itm221383184302

[jronald]

Hi Ray, there sure is...........
I did not find your idea first!

Ron

[rumbero]

It would be interesting to know if any of these adapters would allow to boot from USB or SD card?

[Medessec]

If you need more space, try this:
remove the PCMCIA cage, get a small USB hub (4 ports or so) and connect that to your internal USB port.
Then put in a few more USB flash drives...

Oh god lol! I'd totally do that for my Clevo D900F, that thing has all the interior space anyone could ever possibly want for modding.

This solution is a pretty nice cheap solution, but how is this any better than... well, I don't know... having 2 or 3 flash drives, or one big one, just around your computer at all times or on your person?

I suppose it's good as a permanent storage solution, but I'd just use an Ultrabay HDD, or get a laptop with multiple hard drive bays. But that's not a solution for everyone, I will concede.

I actually happen to have one of those Mini PCI-E to USB adapters inside my Clevo D900F right now- but it's port is currently unused. I was planning to mod a GOverlay LCD into the palmrest, and plug it in with the adapter.

GOverlay LCD: http://www.ebay.com/itm/LCDsysinfo-for- ... 1c3283f3cd

[rkawakami]

According to the few eBay sellers I saw when I did my search, they state that booting from the adapter may not be possible. I guess it depends on both the hardware (adapter) and the flash memory being seen by the system as a bootable drive.

[jronald]

Mine comes up as "E" local drive...maybe?

Ron

[rkawakami]

First test is: Can your "E" drive be seen in BIOS? If not, then I doubt that whatever OS you put on it would boot.

[natgab]

Most of you know I run a Z61t nicely upgraded with the TI lid, 3 gig of memory, a 120 gig SSD, W7 ultimate and a 2.0 CPU. Im not a huge fan of large HDDs, and in fact the largest I own is 160 gig. With roughly 60 gig of music on the Z I was running out of space so I did a little research and spotted this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/400558384797?ss ... 1439.l2649
For less than $10.00 its hard to go wrong with my plan.
The Z series have Dual Wireless card ports for WiFi and Cellular service. One was left open when I built the machine. Using the Middleton Bios, my plan was coming together.

I then sourced this
http://www.ebay.com/itm/360917185566?ss ... 1439.l2649
Because of the casing I needed to crack it out of the plastic shell, but it does fit under the keyboard snuggly. I wrapped it with some surgical splint tape, because thats what I had at the time and reassembled the whole thing.

Moved the music off of the HDD and freed up tons of space for less than $20. Pretty good upgrade!

Ron. .

---What about using a microUSB card? I personally always have one on plugged into my USB ports for dual-booting. This example might not be the cheapest, but wanted to post an example.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-SanDisk-32G ... 3a73fa7268

From what I can read on thinkwiki, my R61 has two PCIe slots right? I have a WIFI card, that means I should have one left over correct?

EDIT: Does the USB show up? Is it bootable, maybe with a bootloader?