M11x WWAN Slot - PCI-E Compatible? (for reference - closed)

In the UK we've got the port free I assume.. I s the WWAN slot just a standard Mini PCI-E Slot? As in, might it house an SSD PCI-E card?

Something like this

 

You can sure try

Although I would imagine it might need to be a half-mini card, but don't quote me on that. I haven't got my wife's M11x yet and haven't researched that either

 

So still no one tried this? I would be very interested to hear if the slot actually is compatible with SSD's...

 

The WWAN slot is regular (well mini) sized. Unfortunately I don't have any mini PCIE cards to try it with. I'd also be curious about this. I might mod mine and put another wifi card in it.. if I decide I want to mess with putting another antenna in the screen.

 

I did some measuring, a 50mm mini pcie card, single sided chips should fit. But on some other forums I read about other Dell machines that weren't of the ssd netbook nature, refused to recognize drives in the slot.

 

I believe others have tried on other dell systems with no go. I think either it needs bios support or the card needs a built in sata controller. I think samsung has some coming out with 200MB/s read 100MB/s write speeds with controller on board, that's something I'd look into.

 

for those interested, I tried a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder card in the WWAN mini-pcie slot and it doesn't appear to be active. The card does not show up in the device manager. I dont get any errors on boot about incompatible hardware or anything like that, just looks like the slot is disabled. I will try with a couple wifi cards and see what happens.

NOTE: the Crystal HD card was purchase on eBay and tested working in my HP Mini 210.

 

Thanks for trying, I'm interested to see if anything works in that slot at all. Would love to have an SSD inthere.

 

Bump this thread on that one! Exactly what I would like to do with my M11X to have the OS on the PCIe slot and also have the HDD in the regular bay it comes in for games and other programs... who knows if it will work even with an adapter...

 

The main problem is that we'd need an SSD with onboard sata controller because the pcie bus doesn't support drives natively like most netbooks. Only Samsung has this type of ssd as far as I know but they aren't available to the public yet..

 

Btw, someone got a dell 5530 wwan card to work in the M11x. You need some specific drivers and do some tricks to get them installed, but it works. Only downside so far is that without proper antenna (there are some that you can buy that may fit, but they are no replacement for the real thing i think) the reception will be poorer than if you got the proper display with wwan antenna cable included.

For those who can read german or dare try some translator, see here:
http://www.alien-forum.net/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=7467#post7467

I now translated the steps (I hope correctly) from german to english:
m11x wwan card

I tried it out myself now and it works. To get good reception use one WLAN antenna and attach it to the WWAN card. WLAN speeds will be reduced (in the 2,4ghz band, but not really in 5ghz band), but WWAN reception is ok to good (full bars outside).

 

I'm pretty sure the port is BIOS locked to Dell specific hardware.

So stuff that Dell has sold works. Like 5530 etc.

 

So SSD even with SATA controller may be a no go?

 

Moved to 11x sub for reference.