Reading a mini PCI SSD

I've bought Eryl a Dell mini 9 netbook for Christmas, which unfortunately has had to be returned due what appears to be a failed BIOS update (though I'm sure I didn't actually press "go" on the update tool).

It got me thinking about data recovery. The mini 9 has a 16GB mini PCI SSD card as its drive.

In a normal laptop if something like this happens I can whip the drive out, back up the data, wipe it and then reinstall the OS before returning it. With this SSD I don't have that option without access to another machine that can deal with a mini PCI SSD card.

Is there a way that I can read/write to one of these cards ? If I replaced the wifi mini PCI card in another laptop with the SSD is there any hope of the laptop seeing the drive ? If not is there some sort of external adapter I can plug it into ?

You just need a machine with an empty mini-PCI slot. VERY common in embedded systems and SBCs.

Or, a PCI/PCIe card with a mini-PCI slot. Those are also available.. (mark rushes off to google now..)

Ahh.. here they are, for $20.

So if I put it in the slot in my other laptop where the wifi card normal lives the laptop would see it as a hard drive ?

That doesn't look like it would fit the card I am talking about. It looks too wide.

Maybe I am talking about the wrong thing. Is there a different between miniPCI and miniPCIe ? I think I am talking about miniPCIe.

Yes, there's a HUGE difference. PCIe (mini or otherwise) is a narrow serial bus, like USB or firewire. 4-wires per lane.

PCI (-X, -mini, or otherwise) is an old-school parallel bus, with a zillion conductors on the connectors.

So, time to google for a mini-PCIe to PCI-expresscard or mini-PCIe to PCIe slot adapter.

Does your other laptop have an "ExpressCard" (external PCIe) slot?

No, only a PCCard slot.

Nice if them to pick such different names for different technologies. Marketing departments

Just have to remember that PCI Express is the current bus and the abbreviation is PCIe. PCI-X was a server version of the old PCI bus and nothing to do with PCI Express.

It's really odd how the I/O slots on consumer PCs seemed to just stop for a while, then quickly catch up with PCIe. PCI had several iterations, going from 32 bit 33mhz slots (what most people think of as PCI), all the way to 64 bit 66mhz slots. PCI-X came along and bumped clock speeds even higher, all while maintaining backwards compatibility in most cases.

I suppose AGP probably had a lot to do with it. Graphics cards seem to be the main driver of better I/O slots in consumer machines, and when they left PCI for a bit, advancement there stopped. Servers and workstations on the other hand continued to push well beyond the 32bit/33mhz slots with things like gigabit ethernet, RAID cards and so on.

Heh.. are you sure about that?

PCCARD == old ISA/AT bus.
CardBus == PCI bus, but accepts older PCCARDs as well.

Pretty sure. It is a Dell D630, which when I bought it earlier this year was the last in the line of that generation of Dells. The Latitudes have newer slots but I'm fairly sure mine only does PCCard.

The reason I am not 100% sure is that Dell talks about "Supports 34mm ExpressCard via USB interface through PCMCIA adapter". Which seems to be some sort of adapter that plugs into the PCCard slot and supports some but seemingly not all types of Express cards.

I'm confused.

What I do know is that it has two miniPCIe slots internally and I'd still like to know whether I can plug an SSD into one of those.

Unless your laptop is ancient then it will support CardBus.


The newer slot is ExpressCard.


ExpressCard is actually PCI Express x1 + USB 2.0. The adapter that Dell are talking about is basically a form factor adapter with a USB host chipset built into it. Not everything works because it only supports ExpressCards that use the USB part of the interface.


Assuming the card physically fits into the area then it should work.

The Dell D630 has a Cardbus slot.

Btw.. True Cardbus (PCI) cards have a gold stripe at the connector end, to distinguish them from older PCCard (ISA PnP) cards. Either type works in a Cardbus slot.

Cheers

It is a bit odd that Dell don't seem to know that

What does that mean for my current issue ? Sorry to appear thick, but it isn't clear to me how having a Cardbus or Expresscard will help me read a miniPCIe SSD ?

You're probably out of luck -- Some companies make adapters to access PCI devices from a PCIe slot, but seldom the other way around.

Best bet is a PCIe carrier card for the mini-PCIe flash drive, which could then plug into a PCIe slot in a desktop/tower PC. Similar to the PCI one I found earlier for $20, but for PCIe this time.

Or any notebook with an internal mini-PCIe slot, though notebook BIOSs are sometimes peculiar about things they don't recognize.

Cheers

I bought my sister a Dell Mini 9 a few months ago. It has an SD Card slot, so could just store all her documents on a good quality card. Would save a lot of faffing around if anything happened to the laptop.

But I've been wondering, how would I reinstall it? It can boot from USB storage and also netboot, but I have no idea how to get XP on there with that.

I've bought Amy a Mini 12, she didn't like the 9 as she thought it was too small and fiddly. It should be here tomorrow, the first thing I'm going to do when it arrives is install XP on it. I can't believe they shipped them with Vista.

That doesn't really deal with passwords and other stuff that gets stored on the main drive. Unless she runs everything via portable versions of apps, which would be a pain.

It isn't so much an issue of recovering data, more wiping it when some failure happens that stops you being able to access the SSD.

I guess I should just try the SSD in my D630's miniPCIe slot and see what happens ?

Well I gave it a try. Getting to the miniPCIe slots on the D630 is much harder than the ones on my old D610.

I installed the SSD in the slot reserved for WWAN cards or Flash Cache Modules.

I couldn't see any sign of it being detected by the BIOS. It didn't appear as a drive in Windows and Windows didn't identify any new devices.

So I can only assume it needs explicit BIOS or chipset support to work.

I know that on the Asus eee, the SSDs use some kind of IDE interface, but with a miniPCI express connector and the different ports have different signals depending on what is supposed to be put in there. I think the SSD for Dell Mini 9 can also be used in an Asus eee, so possibly it's the same there.

Stig

There's a decent chance that Linux might see/use it regardless, especially if it is plugged in with power off (the usual case). Or possibly not, depending on the exact nature of this BIOS misbehaviour.

Cheers

The Dell mini is now packed up to go back to Dell, so I can't try Linux out I'm afraid.