Mini PCIe SSDs?

I am upgrading my Wife's old HP Pavilion DV4 to Windows 8.1 along with a new hard drive. This is in older laptop with a C2D T5800 processor and a GM45 chipset. Since it is being used for backup of her iPhone and iPad, I got her a 1TB drive. While fishing around in there, I noticed that there was an open mini-PCIe port for a WWAN adapter. So I am thinking about adding a small SSD to the laptop to speed up the boot time. I know mSATA is not pin compatible with mini-PCIe, and that HP does lock down their components. Does anyone know of any mini-PCIe SSDs? Are any compatible with HP?

 

This is a circa 2009 notebook? Don't bother trying to find an mSATA SSD that will work inside.

None will.

(it is the logic circuits required that the MB doesn't have; not the physical mini-PCIe port that is at issue).



Take care.

 

There are mini-PCIe SSDs, but I don't think that your BIOS would let you boot off it. You could try with grub loader to do it, and I would guess that it's possible, but I've never tried it. That's first, second - the price is hard to justify the purchase of one of those. They are like twice the price per GB of their mSATA equivalents.

 

Check out my link:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...15-dual-micro-sd-cards-mini-pcie-adapter.html

In my case, the Gateway P-7805u FX used the Mobile Intel PM45 Express Chipset. The era of our chipsets seem pretty close. Like you, I was considering a WWAN adapter, a Bluetooth adapter, or a combo card. You might also consider looking into replacing your LAN adapter likely in a second similar port with a combo cards. You can find WLAN/WWAN combo adapters, Bluetooth combo cards with WLAN or WWAN. I could not find a combo card that held all three, a Bluetooth, WLAN and WWAN all together. I have also seen TV tuner cards, mini-PCIe flavor SSDs, and single and dual port SD Card adapters. The last case is what I decided to go with. It is extremely unlikely that you have an mini-SATA (a.k.a. mSATA) port versus a mini-PCIe port. I think the MR15 adapter from MFactors.com is a great solution. In my research for my PM45 chipset system, the MR15, a mini-PCIe to Dual Micro SD/SDHC/SDXC card adapter did function successfully as long as I used non-Ultra micro SD cards in the two card slots. The Ultra cards fall under a new technology specification known as Ultra High Specification, UHS-1 or UHS-2. A Radio Shack representative told me the UHS-2 cards have some new password protection, a feature typically used in newer cell phones. There are two performance rating systems, one called "Speed Rating", the other "Ultra Speed Rating". The Standard Speed ratings range from Class 2 of 2MB/s to Class 10 of 10MB/s. Those with Ultra Speed Ratings range from 30MB/s to about 95MB/s; so that is a huge difference. In the above link to my review, you will find a link to the SanDisk website that elaborates on this information. For Ultra SD Cards to function properly under UHS compliant specifications, the host device must be UHS compliant; if the mini-PCIe host device port is not UHS compliant, SanDisk claims that the Ultra micro SD Card will fall back to standard "Speed Rating" specifications. However, on my laptop system, the Ultra micro SD cards caused my system on boot-up to lock up with the MR15 adapter. I am unable to determine the location of the problem as the driver, chipset, BIOS, MR15 or micro SD cards themselves. I was able to order two non-ultra SanDisk 32GB Class 4 (4MB/sec) micro SDHC cards off the Amazon website; they worked just fine. My guess is that this solution will also work for you. Obviously, non-Ultra Class 10 (10MB/s) micro SDHC cards would be the best solution if your system does not support UHS micro SD cards. The irony of my system is that the UHS cards loaded into the upscale caddy used in the external SD card slot on the same computer did function successfully; but they ran off of a different driver called "O2Micro SD". Supposedly, according to SanDisk and MFactors, no OEM drivers are necessary if running Windows 7 or greater; built-in drivers are supposedly sufficient. I cannot speak for Microsoft Vista; but this might also be the case in using that OS. I only tested SDHC cards. I think your computer is from the same era as mine; so you should be good-to-go with Secure Digital Standard Capacity (SD or SDSC, 0<x<=2GB/4GB) and Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC, 4GB<x<=32GB) cards. Windows 7 or greater is required to support Secure Digital Extended Capacity (SDXC, x>32GB) cards. Even if you are running Microsoft Windows 7 or greater, it is not clear to me that your system will support SDXC cards. I went into COSCO recently and could not find any non-Ultra SD cards on the store shelves. But, I did find non-Ultra 8GB and 16GB cards at Radio Shack, and non-Ultra 32GB cards from Amazon. I would be curious if you could find non-Ultra Class 10 SDXC cards at the 64GB and 128GB levels that worked in your system as I did not find nor test these cards; that might indicate that my system is also non-ultra SDXC compliant.

In my opinion, especially if your system does not support Ultra SD Cards with the UHS I or UHS II specification, you are not likely to speed up the boot-up time. You bought a 1TB drive; but you did not state the performance specifications for that drive such as rpm (4800, 5400, 7200, or possibly 10,000). Seagate has come out with hybrid drives (HHDs) that are part regular hard drive and part SSD. There are also fully compliant Solid State Drives (SSDs). HHDs are very cost effective for a quick boot-up, backup system. Seagate has 500GB HHDs with 4GB SSD and 750GB HHDs with 32GB SSD, both operating at 7200rpm. They also have 1TB drives with 64GB SSD operating with at 5400rpm; this is a very cost effective drive for a networked backup system, especially where the network transfer speed is the bottleneck. The 5400rpm drive will consume less power too. If you intend to use the system for more than a backup system, you should shoot for a fully compliant SSD. The fastest and largest SSD solutions I have seen are from MyDigitalDiscount.com with read and write speeds in excess of 500MB/s, if you can believe that. No SD card solution can come close to that. The fastest SD Card from SanDisk as posted on their website provided a maximum potential transfer rate of 95MB/s. The benefit of the MR15 with SD Cards would be more to the side of storing critical files, especially if you do not back up often.

If you are looking for a backup server solution, these points have been provided to me by an IT Systems Engineer.
1. SSD hard drives are fast but if they fail, there is no chance of recovery of data. SSD are geared to have about 1 million write operations. The SSDs are designed to write to different locations over time to optimize the life span of SSDs. If there is a recovery method to SSDs, I have never heard of it; it might be very costly. In any case, backups of SSDs are critical.
2. Standard hard drives most often time can have their data recovered. Still, this should not be an excuse to not backup your system on a regular basis.
3. If your laptop system support two or more drives and supports RAID, you can look into RAID 0 (Striping) for performance or RAID 1 (Mirroring) for data redundancy, RAID 1 offering a real time backup solution from a hardware failure, not necessarily a protection from a virus attack hitting both drives at the same time.

Given the points above, the most cost effective and operationally effective backup solution with data recovery in mind is the Hybrid Hard Drive. And, your backup solution is even better if your system's BIOS is hardware RAID supported with two or more SATA drive bays available.

 

Again the biggest problem is most mini PCI-e from that era don't have the SATA controller hooked up to it, so you can't really use it for that purpose.

 

mPCIe slots do not always work with mSATA SSDs. What matters is the pinout of the mPCIe port. If it is lacking the SATA pins, SSDs will definitely not work on the particular port of the laptop in question.


PCI Express Mini Card (Mini PCIe) pinout diagram @ pinoutsguide.com

 

Tsunade_Hime:

His era of computer is from the same era as mine. I have the PM45 chipset. He has the GM45 chipset. His computer most likely supports mPCIe SSDs but not mSATA SSDs. The problem here is that the cost of the mPCIe SSDs is significantly higher than that for mSATA.

I have an mSATA III SSD, 240GB, from MyDigitalDiscount.com ( MyDigitalSSD 240GB BP4 50mm SATA III 6G mSATA SSD | My Digital Discount). I also tried to use this in my laptop. It failed, so I ordered both a USB 3.0 compliant external HDE PCI Express card from Amazon and an external USB 3.0 external case for my mSATA card. The performance for this solution is extremely fast.

I think you can find mPCIe SSDs at 32GB and 64GB. I am not sure about 128GB. The cost is likely more that 2 times the cost per gigabyte on the mSATA side.

If you want to use this mPCIe SSDs for games as a high-speed code page cache such as in using ReadyBoost, you might find value here. You should be warned that ReadyBoost requires an mini-PCIe port which is USB 2.0 compliant or higher. My computer was not compliant with USB 2.0 in the mini-PCIe port. And, I cannot determine if the reason was by design configuration or whether there is a BIOS, Chipset, or Driver Limitation. My goal was originally to create a boot-up Linux partition and load the latest version of Ubuntu. This might be another avenue you might want to try with mini-PCIe SSDs.

Due to the cost of mini-PCIe SSDs and having already purchased an mSATA card for external use, I found the MR15 from MFactors storage which support dual micro SD/SDHC/SDXC cards. I first bought two micro SanDisk 32GB SDHC Class 10 Ultra I cards. Ultra I implies compliance with the Ultra High Specification. Ultra II (UHS-II) are also now available on the market. I found that the Ultra cards locked up my computer on boot-up. I could not find a solution. I turned to standard or non-Ultra micro 32GB SD Class 4 cards from SanDisk. With these I found success. The only problem is that with my Gateway P-7805u FX the cards operated with USB 1.1 performance, under 1.5MB/s. So, you can find very reliable SSD storage space with this path; but it is just not very fast. I have not tried any music or video from these cards. It would be my hope that your mPCIe open available port would support USB 2.0 performance with ReadyBoost support. It would be even better if your mini-PCIe port is UHS host device compliant; then you could also use the Ultra 1 or Ultra 2 SD cards with performance ranging from 30MB/s to 95MB/s. See the SanDisk website for more information on "Speed Rating" for standard SD card devices and "UHS Speed Rating" for Ultra SD card devices.

 

I have an update in that it appears my system was defaulting to the driver 'Disk drive'. I decided to try and update the drivers manually. From the list of available drivers the Generic 'SD Storage Card' driver not work for me at all. But then I tried the OEM 'O2Micro' and the driver 'O2Micro SD Disk Device'. I found that I was now sailing into USB 2.0 territory with sequential read of about 20MB/s and write of 5MB/s. That is much better than about 1MB/s. I gave away my Ultra cards for Christmas; I guess it was meant to be. I hope to retest Ultra (UHS-1, UHS-2) cards before the end of the holidays. If the Ultra cards work, you just might be able to use the cards for increased gaming performance.