Bootable Mini-PCIe SATA SSD for Dell D820?

Hello notebookreview forum!

If I wanted to put a mini-pcie SATA SSD in the WWAN slot of my dell latitude D820 and *boot* from it what should i buy?

Has anyone accomplished this? If not I'm willing to be the test case.

Please let me know. Thanks, Davide-NYC

 

I'm pretty sure there is no way to do this, it requires BIOS support and I'm fairly certain that the D820 does have said support.

 

Urghh, I really want a separate boot drive from my data drive (I will be capturing HD video with the HDD) and would be willing to look at any number of other options...

I have a free PCMCIA slot and an optical bay. Any other ideas?

 

I don't think any SSDs work in the miniPCIe slot except in a few netbooks due to specialized support (I/O controller attached to the PCIe pins) on the netbook themselves. I don't know the D820, but your best bet for an additional HDD/SDD is with the optical bay. I don't think PCMCIA will work.

 

A couple of problems here:

- WWAN mPCIe cards use USB, so your WWAN slot is likely USB only.
- the mPCIe netbook SSDs require that you have a sata controller coming off the pci TX/RX lines. Don't know any notebooks that have that.
- Samsung mPCIe SSD with sata controller will be released sometime.

If you do have a proper mPCIe WWAN slot and use the Samsung SSD, it won't boot without bios support. You might be able to kludge a workaround using an intermediate grub4dos which can then direct the bootprocess.

Would be interesting if you decided to make it a project and figure it out for the community.

 

I would absolutely be willing to undertake a sub $100 experiment to see if the Samsung works.

Grub4Dos, configured to run right after the Win XP (NTLDR) bootloader sounds simple enough.

Questions:

(1) Are there no other mini-PCIe SSDs with SATA controllers available? Runcore? OCZ?

(2) If I decide to go with the media bay HDD as my boot drive, am I better off getting a PATA caddy or a SATA caddy?

 

1/ I think that Samsung is the first I've heard. If you read the specs it suggests it to be an additional drive, ie: non-bootable. Using grub4dos might or might not help.. I'm not sure if DOS would know about that additional drive.

2/ The Dell D820's 945PM/945GM chipset uses a ICH7M I/O controller. Such systems use a PATA interface for the optical drive bay. So you can go either a sata-to-pata or pata optical bay caddy. The sata caddy will give you a far greater range of HDD/SSDs to put into the caddy at lower cost per GB. The disadvantage is there is a 0.8W-1W constant power consumption overhead by the required sata-to-pata bridge chip. A 2510P owner has put a OCZ Vertex in a ebay sata-to-pata caddy and gets 88MB/s read and 65MB/s write sequential performance so they're pretty decent performers.

 

The Latitude D line does have a modular bay adapter that hooks up to 2.5" drives. You'll lose the optical drive, but you could have a hot swappable 2nd hard drive this way.

 

I have a PATA (5200RPM) drive laying around so I purchased a PATA caddy off of eBay. As soon as it gets here I'll load up an operating system and see how my capture goes. If this works it'll be a very cheap and elegant to solution to a typically expensive problem. Thanks for all of your help!

I'll post my experience here once I have some.