Mini PCIe SSD And mSATA SSD

Some notebooks (notably the Asus Eee PC, the MacBook Air, and the Dell mini9 and mini10) use a variant of the PCI Express Mini Card as an SSD. This variant uses the reserved and several non-reserved pins to implement SATA and IDE interface passthrough, keeping only USB, ground lines, and sometimes the core PCIe 1x bus intact.

This makes the 'miniPCIe' flash and solid state drives sold for netbooks largely incompatible with true PCI Express Mini implementations.

Also, the typical Asus mini PCIe SSD is 71mm long, causing the Dell 51mm model to often be (incorrectly) referred to as half length. A true 51mm Mini PCIe SSD was announced in 2009, with two stacked PCB layers, which allows for higher storage capacity. The announced design preserves the PCIe interface, making it compatible with the standard mini PCIe slot. No working product has yet been developed, likely as a result of the popularity of the alternative variant.

To confuse matters even more, there is also an industry standard called mSATA, which uses the same principle of SATA passthrough on a PCI Express Mini connector, but which is electrically incompatible with normal PCIe and ASUS/DELL's connectors. So for example Intel's 310 series may sometimes be advertised as mini PCIe SSD cards, but needs an SATA enabled motherboard.

August 17, 2011

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