ExpressCard SSD in M4500

I have a 48GB WinTec FileMate ExpressCard SSD, which I would like to use with my M4500. However, when I put the card into the slot, the drivers seem to load fine, and I can see a serial ATA controller and two channels in the list of hardware devices, but the disk never appears in Explorer, and remains inaccessible. This same disk works fine in a number of other laptops, such as my M6400, and even my old M90.

Anybody know what the problem could be?

 

I am assuming u are using windows 7, did you try to view the disk in disk management?

 

Hmm, I haven't tried that. You would think that, since it shows up fine on the other machines (one of them 32-bit Vista, the other Win7x64) it should do the same here, but I haven't checked disk management. I'll check and report back...

 

So, I inserted the card this morning, and all of a sudden, low and behold, a driver installation notification for a WinTec ATA drive pops up, and shortly after the Autorun window for the SSD comes up. So it looks like the drive was recognized and working fine, I could access files, etc.

However, when I tried to eject the card from the taskbar icon, nothing happened (no "Safe to remove hardware" notification), although the drive then disappeared from the list of devices, and the list of drives shown in Explorer. Not a big deal, one might think, except now the laptop hung at shutdown, and I had to turn it off with the power button. So there definitely is something wrong with the way this card works in this laptop. What I notice is that the card is quite warm, even hot to the touch when I take it out of the laptop, which means at least that it draws a substantial amount of power. Maybe that's the issue. The card gets just as hot in my other laptops, but those are beefier 17" machines, so they may have a better power supply to that ExpressCard slot.