Testing a Cheap ExpressCard to NVMe SSD Adapter on My ThinkPad T430

This post reminded me how much I always loved PCMCIA, as a standard.<p>The hardware was the size of a candy bar. There was space for a big colorful sticker on the flat side. The insertion force had a very satisfying feeling. The all metal cases made them feel substantial and expensive.<p>Big, colorful, tactile. They were the vinyl albums of the PC world.

Thunderbolt has basically replaced this use case, but some folks have done interesting things with ExpressCard. My favorite is the folks who have managed to successfully run eGPUs on 17-inch MacBook Pros via the slot. (The 17-inch MBPs have not been sold since 2011.)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;egpu-on-macbook-pro-4-1-and-up-with-pcie-expresscard-slot.2135898&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.macrumors.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;egpu-on-macbook-pro-4-1...</a>

I wonder if this might work on my old Dell Precision M4400 I&#x27;ve been tricking out for no reason. So far it&#x27;s had its CPU upgraded to a QX9300 (Core 2 Quad), boot drive upgraded to an SSD, had a copper shim installed between its GPU and heatsink to dramatically improve thermals, and had an Intel Wifi 6 + Bluetooth 5 card installed by way of an adapter that fits into the laptop&#x27;s WWAN slot.<p>It&#x27;s got both an ExpressCard and a PCMCIA slot that I&#x27;ve struggled to come up with good uses for, and an NVMe drive might fit the bill. With that in place it&#x27;d have crazy storage capacity with the ExpressCard slot, two 2.5&quot; bays (one of which is hotswap) and an SD card slot.<p>The thing is a real brick of a machine but it can&#x27;t be faulted for lack of expandability.

I still mourn the death of the pc card slot. I miss being able to store a Bluetooth mouse inside my laptop.

&gt; When copying files to the SSD, the temperature sensor reported a maximum of 60°C. Additional read operations in the form of an ZFS scrub hit 63°C, which was the maximum I observed during my quick testing.<p>Dunno at what temperature the drive starts throttling itself, but I&#x27;d think a good idea would be to drop a dab of heatsink goop (and possibly some metal coins&#x2F;washers held in place if it&#x27;s a big gap) between the important bits of the SSD and the casing. It&#x27;ll conduct heat out much better without the air interface.<p>I can&#x27;t tell if the SSD maker put a sticker on there, or a heat spreader.

Expresscard was like a pci express version of PCMCIA? I didn&#x27;t even know that existed.

Ahhh, the days when you could actually add things to laptops.<p>It&#x27;s probably good for me that I can&#x27;t upgrade anything in my MacBook. I have always had a bad habit of mindlessly maxing things out (or at least using all the slots&#x2F;ports).<p>When I had my Lenovo T420, Micron had a sale on SSD&#x27;s, so I purchased and installed both the mSATA and SATA drives that they offered. For $600 I now could carry every file I had, and didn&#x27;t even need!<p>Then one day, I saw a Wintec Expresscard SSD on a forum, for only $100! I then had another 256GB SSD to add to my laptop.<p>I also stuck 16GB of RAM in that thing, since 8GB SO-DIMM&#x27;s were so cheap at the time. Eventually I removed an SSD to use in another system and put a 2.5&quot; 1TB HDD in there for more storage, and just ran the OS off the faster mSATA drives.<p>In more recent times, you can add multiple drives to the workstation machines like the Lenovo P50, and I currently have a Lenovo T490 with two drives in it. However, you need to buy the right cables and drive adapter depending on if you want M.2 or 2.5&quot; SATA drives, and only a small amount of M.2 SSD&#x27;s will work in the other, shorter slot if you want dual drives. And yes, the T490 has a very un-used 32GB of RAM.

T430s is my daily driver still

My old T420 has had an ExpressCard adapter to add USB 3.0 for ages. At the time I added it the laptop was already old and had been purchased used from this software engineer Russian kid in SF. He sold it to me for 250$ cash and had already upgraded it to 12GB of RAM and an SSD internally (which were cutting edge for the time). I believe he was maybe running OSX on it because part of the reason it was cheap was that it had a permanent imprint of a giant apple sticker on the cover (since removed). He had bought it in Russia (so Russian hybrid printed keyboard which always made it a cool party trick but still easy to type english on). It still works to this day. I was able to easily take it apart years later, redo the cooling paste, upgrade the wifi card, and add that USB 3.0 adapter. It also has an eSata port which means it works great for quickly reading bare drives (with an external adapter you plug a HDD into like a damn SNES Cartridge). Dedicated GPU and i7 means it easily even runs a lot of games as well and run up to 3 plus displays. Still my favourite laptop keyboard ever and I used it for about 8 years and multiple jobs. Now it occasionally plays totally completely legal content to my TV or is an emulator machine with a few bluetooth adapters to DS4 controllers.<p>edit: Based on reading more about these adapters this is definitely super cool but also (functionally) not that amazing for these thinkpads specifically. One of the big downsides of ExpressCard is that it is easily removed (you basically just press in on the adapter and it clicks and then pops out a bit) which means I regularly used to accidentality just barely detach the connection between my USB 3.0 card and the laptop. Obviously for a HDD this is not good. The other thing is that since it is limited to a single PCI-E lane (basically the equivalent speed of a fast SATA SSD) you might as well just use one of the SATA ports in the laptop in the first place. You can of course replace the default drive with a nice SSD and probably get something of similar speed or simply remove the CD drive and put an SSD in its place (there are adapters made for this). And if you are willing to forego internal WiFi and use a USB WiFi adapter there is also another mSATA slot internally that can house yet another (small) SSD. On my T420 at least this means that the laptop can house 3 HDD&#x27;s without using this adapter. That being said the idea of having 4 separate SSD&#x27;s in a laptop from 2011 that never even came with ONE is pretty damn cool!

The best dev of my life was def spent hacking a way on a thinkpad. Best project i ever got to work on was a wireless network bootable pcmcia card. 10+ years too late. Idk if ill ever have the time to ingest myself into doing something similar on a new interface. :&#x2F;

I just bought a PCIE NVME Expansion card. It makes obvious sense - It was like $13, because the card is electrically neutral, just serving as an extension of the PCIE lanes that my NVME will be using.<p>My oldest server had a spare PCIE slot and no NVME ports. Easy enough installation.

Unfortunately, the AliExpress link is down, has anyone found an equivalent article?

Can you boot from this?