# mSATA?



## Crivens (Oct 29, 2013)

Hello world,

I thought about replacing one of the mini-PCI cards in my laptop with an mSATA device. Does anyone here have experience with that? It would be a great thing to add an SSD to the system and keep the spinning rust storage around, SSDs in that storage size are a bit costly.

Reports wellcome, otherwise I would need to take the machine to a shop and try this out there, so I could return the mSATA device if it is not recognized or even blocks the boot process in the BIOS.


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## wblock@ (Oct 29, 2013)

The connector is the same but the signals are different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSATA#mSATA.

There are trays available that replace a DVD drive and hold a 2.5-inch hard drive instead.  They can even be found with internal SATA to IDE converters for slightly older notebooks that used SATA hard drives but IDE DVD drives: http://blog.superuser.com/2011/05/04/best-of-both-worlds-putting-an-ssd-in-your-optical-bay/.  I would probably replace the main hard drive with an SSD and put the hard drive in the tray in case there are speed bottlenecks.

There are also adapters that will hold two mSATA cards in one 2.5-inch SATA space, like http://www.mfactors.com/vm-r2021d-sataii-to-msata-raid-card-in-2-5-inches-ssd-housing/.

I have not tested any of these with FreeBSD or anything else, but would be happy to test them if anyone wants to send me the hardware.


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## Crivens (Oct 29, 2013)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> The connector is the same but the signals are different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSATA#mSATA.


That's what I thought, but that seems to work for some.


			
				wblock@ said:
			
		

> There are also adapters that will hold two mSATA cards in one 2.5-inch SATA space, like http://www.mfactors.com/vm-r2021d-sataii-to-msata-raid-card-in-2-5-inches-ssd-housing/.
> 
> I have not tested any of these with FreeBSD or anything else, but would be happy to test them if anyone wants to send me the hardware.



Well, I think I will sniff around and get more information about that. Your links look good, and I may end up with the 2 mSATA devices for one drive. Or show up in a shop and test the thing prior to buying. If all else fails, I'll maybe try it. So you may end up with an mSATA in your mailbox.


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## wblock@ (Oct 29, 2013)

They say in the article that it is specific to notebooks that support mSATA.  Maybe it's switchable or autodetects on those systems.


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## Crivens (Oct 30, 2013)

Yes they do say that. What caught my eye was the part about "If your notebook is available with a solid state cache ...", which mine did. It came with one of these "turbo memory" things where no drivers are available for anything but Windows. So maybe this can be done - further research seems recommended


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## wblock@ (Oct 30, 2013)

Interesting!  I thought those slots for cache were special-use only, something to do with Intel's chipset and Windows (-only) drivers.  But it would be really nice if they were general-purpose.


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## Crivens (Oct 30, 2013)

When it works, it would be a huuuge boost.

If not, I'd have wasted some money on some mSATA device.

My first attempt, however, might be to add the PCI-ID of the turbo memory thing to the generic ata driver. It would be ironic if that would be the only thing needed to make it working, and having a small ZIL/CACHE (512 MB total) would be better than nothing.


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## rusty (Oct 31, 2013)

As an alternative to mSATA have you considered an SSHDD? 
eg http://www.ebuyer.com/480300-seagate-500gb-solid-state-hybrid-drive-sshd-st500lm000


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## Crivens (Oct 31, 2013)

I do not trust these drives. No real evidence why, but my gut says "no".

What I found yesterday was this, but sadly no source around here. It would limit the financial risk, the SD cards used could serve in my camera or some other place when it does not work out. But 2 x 64 GB of storage for ZIL and cache, would that make sense?


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## wblock@ (Oct 31, 2013)

I just picked up an Acer machine which has an extra empty mini-PCIe port, or maybe it's mSATA.  Possibly both, don't know yet.  This may provide an opportunity for testing.


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