What else is an M.2 WiFi slot good for?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ม.ค. 2023
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Products used in this video:
Wifi 6e card: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_Dei...
2.5 GbE: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DDs...
Dual SATA: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DBJ...
Micro SD: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DFP...
Dual USB 2.0: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DEX...
Cell + SIM card: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DFP...
PCIe: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DD6...
1 GbE (NOT RECOMMENDED! Get the 2.5 GbE version instead!): s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DnS...
Level1Techs video on a similar subject: • Cheat Codes for Breaki...
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The internal USB 2.0 port one could be very useful if you run software that requires a USB authenticator hardware. Keep it inside the PC so nobody unplugs it or loses it.
You can open the PC every time you need to press the button too
@@winterbreeze5709 Leave the pc open to make it more convenient
Add a post-it note to the monitor that says 'if pc not booting, reach inside box and press the button on the secret card'
IMHO, using m.2 for USB is overkill. Your motherboard most likely has some USB 2.0 headers unpopulated
@@jacksonblack9408 Or do what an old neighbor did to my 1st computer for me ( back in the 80's) [computer had a recessed reset button, he put a grommet in the hole, then thru hole from inside put a shortened nail, from outside .. a washer, then spring from old retractable pen, then a portion of a cap from old non-retractable pen] .. pressing this collection of parts pushed the reset button. .. do this thru case & you can keep the case closed
@@Fixator10 I have an ASRock small form factor system that doesn't have any USB 2.0 headers. But it does have an m.2 slot.
The micro SD reader is nice for a PlayStation Vita that came with a 3g modem. You can swap the modem for the micro SD reader. And that well I used to greatly expand the onboard memory, while still being able to use the cartridge slot for games normally. For that use case it's a extremely elegant solution.
Fascinating! Is it a drop-in replacement, or is software trickery needed to get the new storage to work?
@@PhysicsGamer software trickery, but luckily the vita is one of the most hacked devices around lmao
@@PhysicsGamer a little bit of software trickery, but basically a drop in deal at this point.
That’s sick, is that only for the 3g models? I have a WiFi model and expanding the storage without using the cart slot SD adapter can be tough
I was working in wireless r&d when m.2 (or "NGFF" at the time) was still being standardized. I'm a little surprised that you didn't come across piles of the main use cases that we were expecting back then: WWAN, NFC, and GPS.
I believe at least one of those was present. The board with the SIM card slot. The board takes a pci-e mini lte modem. I use something similar for my home made wireless cellular home and travel internet.
@@aguiremedia oh, how is the performance of WWAN on that kind of system?
So the expectation was that it would be a PCMIA replacement? Interesting.
@@nathanbrown492 very good. I use one for home internet. The pci modem plugs in a hat( little dock) that sits on top of a raspberry pi. Rooter runs it, rooter is an open source build on openwrt. Super easy. Many people build them for rv traveling. To get internet while traveling
@@PhysicsGamer basically, except the port is usually on the inside of the machine as opposed to the outside
One reason to use fiber is to have a more significant galvananic separation between a router and a distant part of the network, so in case of power surges/lightning etc, you have a bit more isolation.
Glass Vs Copper....!
It also uses way less power than copper at 10Gbps
‘Have a more significant galvanic separation…You have a bit more isolation’
I beg to differ … Optical fiber gives totally completely 100% isolation… it is ZERO zip nada electrical connection.
I ran single-mode fiber between my house and my Man-Cave (aka ‘barn’) to keep the two COMPLETELY isolated.
Also, at 350’, it was actually cheaper to use fiber (armored under-ground rated)
Another reason: travel miles/kilometres at high data rate instead of a few hundred feet/metres!
Back in the day, I was using optical cable to get sound out of PC exactly because of this reason, because there can be a lot of interferences, it was a massive problem still like 10-15 years ago. With today soundcards and motherboards, thankfully I don't have this problem anymore, sometimes it is there, but you will start noticing it after you use some proper big amplifier and speakers, so the vast majority of people will never feel that problem.
I had an old thinkpad from like 2015 that I had added an e-GPU into the m.2 slot. It ran amazingly well. It used an m.2 to HDMI cable that plugged into a little PCB that I had to plug a very specific printer power supply into. my friend shipped it to me from China and I had to ship it back but it amazed me that it worked as well as it did.
Yeah it even works so well, you can actually do gaming on these laptops. Especially on those with IntelGraphics 4000 only. So the system runs a lot cooler than those with internal Nvidia GPUs, while the eGPU can be cooled way better externally.
so why did you ship it back ?
@@undefinednull5749 because "he had to" lol
I've done the same! and it is and amazing way to increase the lifespan of the laptop i think, it ran so much more new games! (it had gtx660 in it, and i connected a 1050ti)
I had to wrap that m.2/hdmi cable in aluminium foil to make it work much more stable tho haha!
I remember seeing a project just like that some years back. Before laptops started being accessible with crazy gpus
The explanation for a lot of these is that small x86 router builds frequently have one or two of these slots - the sim card WWAN adapter especially is something a lot of routers might use (as a backup network connection)
Ditto for the interface for fiber networking, as it allows the machine to completely replace the router that takes the fiber optic connection from the ISP or a 300 foot cable to a room 30 floors above or below you (the other floors being rented by other families or businesses, but you have a NAS in your basement locker and a gaming machine in your small apartment halfway up in the building).
Another thing you may want to connect is technical interface cards such as a card to control a telescope (if you like filming stars and planets) or a video capture card for filming videos in "8K" resolution.
@@johndododoe1411 Making a router that replaces all my ISPs spyshit is exactly why i'm here and looking at this. 1 extra 2.5Gb port isn't much, but it's more useful than some wifi M.2 card with no driver support, can't be put into monitor mode, and has 2 unused USB3 ports for a much better wifi dongle anyway.
@@John-rw9bv I work for an isp as a tech and i can grantee you that nothing you do on your end can get you away from any spyshit as you put it.
@@toejah Disagree, i take my ISPs fiber and plug it straight into some chinese router gateway thing that forces all LAN traffic through wireguard VPN. I actually do this twice (with a second chinese router and a second VPN contract) because then the VPN providers also either dont know who i am or know who i am but dont know what i'm looking at. It's a pretty extreme setup, but i dont do it because i have something to hide, rather, because its just how the internet should have always been.
@@John-rw9bv sorry i was not fully clear on what i meant. what i was trying to say was that any of the packet harvesting is not being done on the ISP modem gateway but on the pond equipment in the CO. So even if you use your own modem gateway and have the packets encrypted. The packet is still visible to the ISP.
7:51 That thing is made to put older 3G/LTE cards (mPCIe) into a more modern socket. Those cards are often found in old higher end notebooks. And to support mobile networks it needs a SIm card which that adapter provides. Modern notebooks have an LTE card which already uses m.2 .
So in a Acer nitro would I be able to just get one n put a sim in without the wlan?
@@DrAwoke I don't know which exact model of Acer Nitro you have. But in theory that should work if there is the required space inside the notebook. And it depends on which signal lanes are actually connected on the m.2 or mPCIe connector. Usually it has PCIe and USB which should work then. But you will also need some different antennas for LTE if you decide to put a card for it inside.
If you want it to look clean, you could use a flex cable with a sim holder instead of the adapter card. It would take up less space.
Sometimes notebooks have more than one of those slots. So you could maybe still keep wifi or you just use a dongle for that.
Be very careful because those lte modules almost never use the pci bus though rather the usb bus, your system must have the usb pins actually wired up.
@@SuperSpecies some systems have only usb wired up, fine for 3g but a issue for router wlan cards
@@peterweber79what do you mean by router wlan cards? As in the wifi cards don't use the usb pins?
A lot of professional software uses USB keys for the licensing. Allows you to have the software to be installed on every computer but only pay a few licenses. Most of the time you'll have a key for every workstation that's regularly used plus a couple extra. The every day use workstations usually have header to port adapters inside, but I could see the m.2 to USB port adapter being useful sometimes.
imagine using the m.2 for extra ram🤣
@@raven4k998 That exists.
Yep, computers at work have a $15K USB dongle plugged in there
Those M.2 SATA controllers are handy, I've used them in a small ITX NAS build before.
You have to be careful though, they come in two variants: One is an actual, proper PCIe->SATA controller (using something like the Micron JMB58x series), the other is a SATA port multiplier (based on the JM57x) that breaks out the host's SATA interface into multiple downstream ports. The latter not only limits your devices to a total, shared bandwidth of only 6 GBit/s, but it may not work at all in your device since not all M.2 ports supply SATA!
The controller firmware on some of the noname adapters are awful - might be alright to accept the speed reduction for reliability in some scenarios.
Thanks for that detail. I never knew about these adapters, and now I'm starting to think about using my 7th gen NUC as a NAS / VM Host / always-on machine.
Also from memory, not all SATA controllers support port splitting like that right? I remember this from one time I wanted to hook up multiple drives to a low count SATA port since they were gonna be low bandwidth or used one at a time only. Quite a bunch of SATA controllers didn't support that kind of feature back then, but it was ~2014 or so if I recall.
I have one of these M.2 SATA cards, the one with a real Jmicron controller. I wasted a lot of hours on trying to get it working stable enough to be usable with no results. The thing just dies under any kind of heavier load. And no, it's not overheating.
I don't know, maybe I was just unlucky and got a defective unit...
@@povilasstaniulis9484 probably a firmware issue again. Using the port to give yourself a proper storage HBA better in some cases (apart from cost and physical space)
The sim card one has a slot for a wwan card. Older laptops had a slot on the motherboard next to the wifi (wlan) card. The sim card is usually accessible externally under the removeable battery.
Edit: Didn't think this through correctly and was wrong; I think. Is this device capable of using older WiFi AND a SIM card? That would be a highly useful device.
@@xero110 no. The SIM is presented to the WWAN-card only and is needed for it to function.
@@xero110 it's basically provide cellular Internet you know like 4g or 3g connection
They still have them. My Thinkpad X1 has a WiFi and LTE card with a phone style SIM tray. Also seen the adapters with a USB A plug on the end.
Buisness laptops do still have a 4g or 5g modem.
There are also M.2 to U.2 cables for using U.2 SSDs. Very handy way to get gobs of NVMe SSD storage for relatively cheap (compared to their M.2 counterparts).
Decent M.2 NVME SSDs are less than $100/ TB, you can even get no name M.2 SSDs for $50/TB
@@MichaelClark-uw7exYeah they have come a far way. Ive seen some competitive 2tb SSDS for 80 USD post tax.
what U.2 drives you found ?
Additional card(s) with help from the commenters:
-FPGA board: www.crowdsupply.com/rhs-research/picoevb
-Firewire! I can't find it for sale anywhere and I'm sure it's super expensive. But someone did make one: www.spectra-austria.at/en/products/ipc-components/pc-expansion-cards-modules/firewire/m2-2213.html
-A SSD exists: sqf-c3av1-512g-edc
@@PlasmaStorm73N5EVV there are expensive DAW interfaces that use firewire (too expensive to retire "early" whilst the hardware and software are still otherwise viable).
ASRock Rack makes an M.2 B+M key GPU! Its called the M2_VGA obviously made for server applications where you don't have an IGPU or room for even discrete GPU but do have a free M.2 slot.
If you ever find a m.2 card that converts each of the x1 lanes into a full PCIe slot please let me know. I was looking into this a while ago but never found one that converted both lanes (probably because, as you mentioned, not all motherboards wire both lanes!)
I still have some video on digital tape that I'd like to transfer. The camera has a FireWire port but I no longer have any computer that has. Commell sells a m.2 FireWire adapter m2-2213 I guess I now have to find out if my laptop has a m.2 port.
@@PlasmaStorm73N5EVV A lot of pro audio gear which is still perfectly useable today is firewire.
THANK YOU! I'm glad I'm not the only one that's looked into weird adapters like this. I get so annoyed that MB manufacturers eat up so many PCIe lanes with all these interfaces that I'm never going to use and leave almost nothing for actual expansion cards.
I managed to stick an M.2 ssd into a PCIe port through a converter and it runs great! I used to dream about having M.2 slots, but i never thought of the PCIe ports..
@@afti03 Honestly, I wish MB companies made an option without M.2 slots. I'd rather have more expansion slots that I can use how I want. M.2 expansion cards are easy to find, but I stick with SATA because I have need for quite a few separate drives.
@@DarkDragonEWA Same here, it would be nice if MB mfr's made a variant of their "most popular" motherboard and stripped out the m.2 for maximum expansion slots (or to a lesser extent, raw sata connectors.)
@@jong2359 Yes, same boat here! And USB headers are often woefully undersupplied, too.
@@PhysicsGamer you can plug 127 devices and need just one header
I've wondered this question and this video is exactly what I was looking for in terms of answers. I've got a few old laptops, and I love the idea of doing something weird to save an old device from the landfill by finding just a little bit more of a random life option in it.
Please don't put electronics in the trash... most electronics retailers (such as Best Buy) will take them. (At least here in Canada)
You should have a local WEEE recycling centre somewhere near you - they take all your e-waste, dead batteries, etc. (for free) - and separate the non-lethal/non-toxic recyclable components from the nasty, dangerous, chemical stuff for reuse or correct storage disposal.
The SFP slot is useful if you want to electrically isolate a device from the rest of your network - fiber doesn't conduct electricity and avoids ground loops
why would you need to do this?
If you're connecting copper between buildings, each building can be at a slightly different ground potential. So what is "ground" could actually have a pretty big delta and cause things to fry. Copper isolators and fiber are super common for stuff like that.
That being said, I stand by saying 1 GbE fiber is near useless for a home use case unless you have a shield a half Km away you need to connect. :D
@@PeterBrockie Or a shed half a km away...🏚
Fiber is also just better. I don't know the specifications of that card, but a lot of transceivers use less power and also can go faster. 1Gbps is really the limit for copper ethernet - 2.5Gbps is pushing it and 10Gbps is really pushing it and only goes a few meters, but fiber is fine up to thousands of Gbps (which your computer can't handle).
Those little box for m.2 looks really nice. You gave me the idea to make some stand ups for a few ram sticks that I want to display in a shelf.
That is so cool. I remember hijacking M.2 for external PCI-E, but this is way more variety than I imagined.
In IoT, those mini PCI-E sim adapter boards are very common. Generally the cell modems only use the USB 2.0 lanes anyway, so the rest of the mini PCI-E is used to talk to the SIM card and the actually M.2 PCI lanes are unconnected. You can also find those same type of adapter boards with a USB 2.0 Type A plug.
Excellent video. The average person wouldn't be able to find and learn about different m.2 gadgets, this video helps a lot.
In a similar curiosity, I have been trying to find gadgets to use the second sim slots for the some in phones.
There was a point you could use the empty sim slot to add a "NFC tap to pay" to a phone. I'd watch the hell out of more of these kinds of informative port videos.
corvusaflame713
NVMe is easy to understand, just PCIe lanes !
why you don't understand basics ?
I'm still fighting the urge to fill those slots with gen 5 SSDs frying my MB
That 2.5G bracket is for small 1 liter form factor PCs from Lenovo or Dell so you can have the second ethernet port on them. The SATA adapters cannot be used for booting, or so I've heard.
Thank you for the concise and insightful showcase and for reminding the dual SATA port one exists, I remember seeing it on NewEgg a while back but now I'm def gonna buy one :)
I used one of those Gigabit ethernet M.2 cards to make a pfsense router out of a ThinkCentre M72e Tiny Desktop. Thing is super small but loaded with power for the job. Worked fantastic! Love the flexibility of M.2
There is indeed a standardised way to connect a SIM to a 4/5G card. That device you showed is used for that (you could plug the 4/5G card into it as well). The reason they did this is so that you could use ESIM without any issues if the host device supplied the SIM, or in laptops where this would have been wired to some other place on the motherboard for easy access to the physical SIM. ThinkPads have accessible SIM slots from the side of the device that are wired into this bus.
I've added the extra NIC to some of those "Micro" 1L tiny computers to make them proxmox hosts and routers. Pretty handy when you have limited options!
Thanks for the rundown.
That panel mounted ethernet jack makes perfect sense. If you are short on PCie slots and you actually need a product like this, a bracket isn't going to be of very much use to you. If you have spare PCIe slots, then you'd just use a PCIe card instead. A single lane of PCIe 3.0 is pretty much enough for 10GbE, so it's not like it costs you a significant number of lanes.
I also think one of the primary uses for this would be in embedded systems, where you might not have any PCIe brackets exposed on the back at all due to space or form factor limitations, and you might be using some weird custom mainboard that doesn't have PCIe slots, but you could fit a cutout for an ethernet port pretty much anywhere.
A panel mount to me seems far more versatile than a bracket. It enables these use cases where a bracket would just not work.
Actually PCIe 3.0 x1 lane is 8GT/s (985 MB/s). It's not enough for full 10Gbe. Mellanox ConnectX3 performs averaging above 6Gbps, or 720MB/s by the tests. That's because of lot of retransmit packets caused by PCIe bandwidth limitation.
tbh I assumed it was so you could add it to a laptop. If you dont mind a little hardware hacking you could pull the original slower ethernet jack out and pop that in its place. Yours makes more sense though lol
Most likely aimed at those wanting to do pfsense or similar using a small form factor pc that doesn’t have normal bracket slots. That panel would be the same size as the gap left behind when an unneeded display output is removed.
wow, this was so nice, i did not know you could have so many options! thanks for the vid man!
Good stuff. Video title was exactly what I was hoping to expect.
I recently used the 2.5Gb panel mount one in a TFF (1L) to build a pfSense router. The RJ-45 mounts perfectly in the "option" slot of the 1L box. Love the part @10:02 ❤
Can you pls link to the card you got? I got few thinkcenter 1L to fill
Awesome! The ribbon cable looks like it will work much better to route things on a small form factor system VS the 1gb models with the header pins that stick up too high.
Did you do some tests with iperf3 to confirm speed and are they reliable? Any links plz
@@mvadu same reading the same posts and replies but with no info
Nice video! I was thinking the adapter with the SATA ports could probably enable something like an Intel NUC to ran two SATA drives off the wifi card port.
I don't think of ever need any of this, but the video was genuinely interesting. Thank you for making it.
What a great use for M.2!!! This gave me some ideas! Especially adding Bluetooth to my PC which is something most motherborads don't come with unless it's a laptop. So I will be looking into this more! Thanks man!
The card at 07:43 is actually a GSM MODEM converter from m.2 to minipcie, there are dedicated pins on minipcie slot for sim cards, you put in a sim card and a GSM mini pcie card on top, it is not a sim reader.
Doesn't look like anyone has mentioned this yet but the 'panel mount' ethernet port you're looking it is what you'd use to pop in a second ethernet port on an SFF/Micro PC. A lot of the HP/Dell/Lenovo micro PCs have a spot where one of those would mount nicely
Exactly!
Thanks a lot for this amazing informative video. I was wondering for many years if wifi m.2 slot could have alternative adapter for different use. This is astounding as so many adapters and extentions are available for this slot.
I used one to run a cheap eGPU. I even have a guide on my channel on how I got it working. It's pretty old now though. Great video!
SFP has many uses. Extended distances for example, countries that had their telecommunications revolution only in the last two decades, like Latvia, did everything with fiber and SFP modules (coincidentally the reason why many Mikrotik routers have SFP slots). GPON up to 1G can be put into these slots also. And it's great to electrically isolate installations. The small RJ45 transformers don't have a particularly high isolation voltage. And in industry, there might be too many interferences for RJ45.
There are also DSL modems available in SFP formfactor. Useful when building your own router.
@@HerrFreese Yes, although the ones I tested were complete crap, unfortunately.
Would have been a really elegant solution on customer sites to avoid external modems ...
@@graealex Interesting! Which problems did occur? Which modules did you test, - by any chance also the Proscend 180-T?
@@HerrFreese It was OEM labeled by a distributor, and other modules were too slow. Is there even a module currently for 250 Mbit/s VDSL? I specifically searched for 100 Mbit/s and then switched to external modems because the tests with the SFP module yielded worse transfer rates, plus periodic connection faults.
The SFP option could be really useful if you'd want to build a custom router for an FTTH scenario, where you have singlemode fiber from your provider
You'd probably need a GPON SFP
At 5:00 I use that in my current NAS build!!
By default, most ITX boards only had 4 SATA ports but my NAS case had 5 HDD bays so I got one of these for a boot drive and 5th hard drive :)
Thanks for the tips, some of these could very well come in handy for me!
Cool man. I recently acquired an older DELL Inspiron 2020 AIO and as I opened it up to clean and see what I could upgrade, I noticed it has 2 of those slots. One is populated with a WiFi/Bluetooth card and the other is unpopulated. I was thinking about what I could throw in there but, haven't looked to see what's out there yet. Thanks for sharing the info!
That 16x slot adapter could be pretty useful in some ITX cases. In olden days some would have a random single slot separate from the usual 2 slots. Perhaps get a capture card in there or something.
I asked myself this question exactly 1 week ago 😅 - thank you a lot for this video :)
Amazing! Thanks, very interesting to watch
I did this with a motherboard that lacked a full size pcie slot but had an M.2 for wifi. I used an adapter to get the full size slot but then plugged a riser into that slot which then allowed me to connect it to a GPU which I held in place with a metal clamps thing you can get for "antisag" purposes, but the point is that it allowed me to then actually mount the GPU into the case's PCIe holes.
This is a very interesting discussion piece for me, since I'm just about to embark on using the A+E key slot on an older Intel NUC to build a small 4 bay NAS.
Would be very interesting to see if the M.2 A/E ribbon extenders to M.2 B/M will work with that 5 port SATA adaptor you showed.
Thank you for uploading this! i was searching for this video since i bought my board!
my board is a cheap b660, both 4x m.2 are used, but i haven't used the wifi m.2 yet because i use usb wifi.
The fiber SFP one would be useful for builds which are too far away from your central network node, something over 50 meters. Cheapo SX optics would allow you going as far as 550m and LX/LH up to 10km.
What I liked about the Dell E5620 was it had a Bootable key card that booted to a CE environment with internet, mail and I think even music player. All at the touch of a button. It was used for low-power and while Airplane-Mode is active. Pretty cool. Never really used it but cool enough. It had some janky file system that looked like a cross between a PE and Win95. 😂
@@daggers101 E5620 is an Inspiron. Only thing that sets it apart from others is the word Business. 😂 and that module.
I used to have an ASROCK B550M PRO4 with my R5 3600. I got it for $90. I loved that it has an M.2 WiFi slot where I threw an AX200 into. I've never had better WiFi since, and the good thing was that I could update it very easily.
Nice collection!
About the adapter with SIM @8:00 - I had several business class laptops with optional builtin 3/4G. They don't have SIM slot on the card, but the laptop has a slot for them, so some of the pins are reserved for connecting the SIM and the modem. If I remember correctly, several pins are reserved for manufacturer specific use, so those are utilized for this.
The X16 adapter makes a lot of sense for older Thinkpads or laptops that had integrated graphics. If you've got an old I7 class CPU but no GPU to speak of, even a 1X connection over PCI-E Gen2 (though hopefully 3) would be enough to run a basic card like a GT 1030 and get you a much more usable PC at the end of it. Hell, you could even build yourself a basic docking station and use the GPU with an external monitor for better performance.
I personally have an old HP office laptop. Basic and loud AF. Doesn't hold a charge for more than 3 hours. But it has a 1080p screen and an i7 3720QM.
With 16Gb of ram and a basic SSD, it's more than usable in 2023. But the integrated graphics really hold it back when you try to watch YT or edit 3D models.
Could easily swap out the inbuilt WIFI card for a USB dongle to gain the option of real GPU horsepower.
woof, that's a power hungry laptop chip. If you're needing a new laptop an old 8th gen thinkpad can be had for hardly anything these days and even older is cheaper. I just got an x260 with a big chungus battery for less than $100 shipped. I don't need lots of performance and 6th gen is efficient enough.
Motherboards that take CPUs without integrated GPUs should also have slots in them though
Apparently m.2 b key has an optional USB 3.0 interface. It can provide two pcie lanes, but in sata mode, the pins for one differential pair are for the sata interface, and the other can be for USB 3.0's 5Gbps differential pairs (the 2.0 pair is somewhere else)
I don't think a lot of b key slots bother with it though, even if they support sata mode.
Thanks for the information sir!
Thanks man for sharing. So such cool and informative video.
I was contemplating using the 1x to 16x adapter for an external nvidia gpu on my NUC, for CUDA usage.
Another interesting use is connecting a sata raid card, for recycling an old laptop into a server.
I made a server like that a while back, the way drives were held is with a crossed bungee cord, it works very well to isolate vibration and is very cheap.
I could find the SFP adapter being useful for building an x86 router out of those mini desktop PC's. Though still a very niche item.
Excellent video. My Mediatek Wifi card died and I was looking for how to replace it, and stumbled on this!
Who knows, later on I might not need a WiFi card, so I might pick one of these others out as well!
Good job - you earned yourself a subscriber!
THANK YOU !! I was looking for a M.2 adapter for a SIM card like the one you show at 7:24.
I have an old laptop that I travel with (old, small and cheap so it is not an issue if something happens to it) and I wanted to add cellular internet to it to not be reliant on external dongles.
The A+E key (on the motherboard) I had was at pcie3.0 1x. I used an adaptor to pcie(slot) and used a cheap drive pcie card and hooked some drives up to it. But being limited to 1x speed, it is kinda limiting(near a gigabyte a second). Probably best to keep it as a network device.
Do you think if I put m.2 nvme ssd via adapter to this A+E slot...Will it work?
There are far more additional uses for NGFF slots. One is AI accelerators (some, like Coral, require specifically E-key), other is fact, that A+E carries over USB signal (Bluetooth on WiFi cards isn't routed bv PCI-Express, but hangs off USB bus), so there are some straight USB pass-troughs. I believe NGFF is also designed to carry SPI, LPC and I2C signalling, so you could build quite a frankenstein device that usess all of it. I am sure I have seen a server, which had a backup BIOS and BMC SPI flash chips housed on standard 2230 NGFF card, that could be replaced with micro SD card reader (in which case BMC would register it as a storage device) or cellular modem (for GPS and remote provisioning/control needs).
There are some audio cards (of questionable quality), single software-defined video card with VGA header made by ASpeed (that's the ASRock one), and another, slightly better made by Matrox, and whole plethora of serial/parallel host cards, again super useful for adding that functionality to SFF PCs.
The ethernet port is quite useful, it could be used to add second port to NUC-like SFF PCs, or even SBCs, replacing WiFi with wired connection. This is preferred, if you want to run router OS, like DD-WRT or OPNsense on it, since WiFi AP will be better handled by dedicated device, and there are very few commercially available WiFi cards that can handle master mode, or AP mode anyway (i.e. Intel forbids 5/6GHz Master mode on its cards and blocks it in firmware, while Qualcomm has special line of AP-class cards with higher power budget and MU-MIMO up to six U.FL connectors, but they won't fit in most slots as they are double-wide and will conflict with other board components, and they require substantial cooling, including full thermal pad underneath, they also cost as much as an actual enterprise class AP).
The SFP card caught me off-guard, though. I have older laptop, which has ton of space inside, I can very much picture dropping one inside.
Thanks for the video!
Uhhh, he mentioned like, all of this. Even Coral specifically.
@@s3cunit It's one thing to mention it, it's another to autistically screech into the void, which is what we were apparently looking for.
@@John-rw9bv :D lol
Thx for your detail sharing👍
Love the microSD slot adapter - that's neat. It would be practical to have that installed in a laptop, to use as a backup disk.
Thank you for this!
I like the 2.5g nic.
The usb and pci-e adapter might work out well for passing through with virtual machines.
You stated that the m.2 is actually dual pcie 1x connections, so I would be curious if an adapter could be made with 2 pcie slots to allow them to be split to different vm's.
No it won´t unfortunately :(. The usb adapter doesn´t have an actual controller on it, but it's just a hub from the motherboard usb controller. M.2 type A/E contains USB signal. So it's the same thing as one of the plenty of USB2.0 headers on the motherboard, and as it's not an actual controller so you can´t pass it through. (you'd have to pass-through the motherboard usb controller completely)
@@chrisdejonge611 And you usually don't want to do that. I guess you could fall back to a usb pci-e to plug in to the m.2-> pcie, but then your dealing with a chain of adapters increasing risk of gremlins.
The MicroSD card is pretty helpful if you want to use all of your drives in a RAID and keep the OS separate from RAID. While the OS might be slow, it is a good option for budget RAID to use all your drives for data.
Be really careful with options like this though. Make sure the card does not get that many write cycles (swap, logging) and make regular backups. It might die within a few months as those are usually not made for this type of application and therefore have no or very bad wear leveling.
@@TheRailroad99
Yeah, if one were to do that, I'd say probably format it as F2FS, which is specifically designed for flash memory. And since that would imply using Linux.... well, it CAN be configured to have a read only boot drive, and store all installed programs and user data on a RAID array. Set up KVM with PCIe passthrough if you want to use Windows, and now you can take OS snapshots whenever you want, and easily revert the whole OS if anything goes wrong.
You're better off using an M.2 SSD for the reasons mentioned above, but we can still get there stupidly. There are M.2 A/E to B/M adapters. There are M.2 A/E to USB3 adapters, and USB3 M.2 B/M carriers. The USB3 route has the advantage of bypassing NVMe's PCIe lane requirements.
Just be aware that Windows is offended by the idea of being installed on a USB device, and linux live-bootables have this insane commitment to no sustainable persistence. You can give them a persistence file, but it works like a DVD-R, you can erase what's there by writing a new copy in a new place and ignoring the old copy. This is guaranteed to eventually fill all available space and become jammed.
Up until recently it was also a good option for VMware homelabs to boot to an internal SD card.
Great video. BTW, the last M.2 to PCI slot adapter is used for things like plugging an external GPU card (low bandwidth) to small SoC boards with M.2 slots, or to the wifi card on a laptop. In a lattepanda, for example, you can plug some low range Nvidia GTX cards and get juuuust enough power for PS4 emulation or 2015's AAA titles. Weird hacks...
Nice. Definitely got some great ideas from this for sure.
I've been doing exactly this last week, and TLDR you found all the ones i did and the USB-A and SIM/PCIe ones i'd never seen before! Great video! FWIW i'm not sure if that 2.5Gbit port actually can throughput 2.5Gbit, if you could try that would be really interesting
It should be at least PCIe 3.0 x1, so probably full speed
pci-e 1.0 x1 can transfer ~250MB/s (full duplex), it's close to the max for a 2.5bgit lan. but most boards now have a pci-e 3.0 so it's not really a problem.
You both talk about the bus speed, not the network interface speed. The network interface speed is based on the realtek (probs.) chip used, which is very cheap.
Also 20% of PCIe2's speed is used in protocol overhead..
This video/topic is about using "the other" M.2 port on your computer that probably isn't being used, because it was designed to have a single wifi interface installed. For such a gigabit connection, yes PCIe2 2x will do and is the standard (Rock 5b/rk3588). Such computers usually come with PCIe3 4x too, but it's almost always used for storage. These "wifi" M.2 are way slower, usually no faster than what's needed for the latest Wifi spec. So when you start adding 2.5gbit interfaces, 10gbit interfaces, and particularly if you want more than 1 port, say for a router or something, then PCIe2 is just too slow, and even PCIe3 4x isn't great (can just run an Intel X520 with 2 SFP ports).
Thats why i love pc hardware... If you can dream it, it exist lol
Well done for finding those weird and wonderful cards!
ive seen a M.2 SDR (Software Defined Radio) perfect for laptops ...but pricey!
The SATA one would be useful for me so I can get a separate SATA controller for VMs. I only get one in my motherboard.
Thanks for expanding my horizons as to what's out there. I'll likely never use any of these - until I want to.
Very nice video, all of these things are interesting, especially that micro sd board
You know, it's funny, as a PC builder the first two ideas of such gizmos to search for (because you didn't mention them) were a TPM module so that people could upgrade their PC to Win 11, and any kind of ARGB controller for people without headers built into their mobos. And flirk me sideways, but after five minutes of searching all of my normal haunts (which was about all of the effort I cared to give) I could not find either as an option. TPM I get, as a security system, USB is probably not an ideal way to add it. Which is why so many mobos have add-in headers for TPM ... that all use different pin standards. Meh. But USB ARGB controllers exist, so why not for the m.2 "wifi" card? How weird is that? No one? Not even one?
Mandatory TPM is a bit evil. Switch to a different OS.
I've found that the USB2 one is more useful in the niche cases when you are repurposing existing components that use USB, like smart card readers, sensors, old laptop webcams etc. You don't even need the USB cable then but connect directly to the connector on the PCB.
This! If you have a spare M.2 slot and you don't need wifi, but you want to expand your options, can anything beat the flexibility, support, and low cost of USB?
Those small nics are awesome for tiny/mini /micro 1 liter PCs. I have that setup for one hp mini and it functions as a beefy router
One use case that comes to mind is a hypervisor running on that m.2, and leaving the other pci-e lanes and additional m.2 for storage.
M.2 to SATA is a great idea. Most modern motherboards seem to only have 4 or 6 SATA ports.
The reason Bluetooth is over USB is because Bluetooth drivers are dark arks. Even Intel isn't going to touch that with 10 foot pole. It's also why at lot of full size PCIe WiFi cards have a USB header input.
Also one you missed is the dual port Ethernet cards. I use the single port cards with Dell USFF PCs to make tiny routers. You can fit the Ethernet port right where the WiFi antenna used to go though the rear panel.
Great content! Thanks for creating this.
Nice man. I might try one of the SATA port expansion ones.
Thank you. Great sum up video.
The SIM card one I can tell you exactly what it is for.
Laptops with WWAN usually use the same interface for the WWAN card. I actually attempted to add one into a Dell Precision M6600 because it had the slot & at the time I had a WWAN card from a different computer that was no longer useful.
I installed the WWAN card but then discovered that although the MB had the WWAN slot & even wired-in antenna cables, it didn't have a SIM slot. I looked at one of those, but it was too tall to fit because you put the WWAN controller into that along with the SIM. For a desktop that could give you 3G/4G.
I looked trying to find one that had the SIM along with the WWAN, but, at least at the time, I was unable to find one. Now knowing that there's a USB lane in the card I'm sure I could have found a USB SIM slot, or even an SD-to-SIM adapter, but at the time I didn't think about that
Great video. I wish I could have seen this years ago. I needed M.2 "wifi" slot adapter to usb port for my diy laptop. As you said, aliexpress has terrible search engine, but ebay is similar. I accidentally found device at 7:10 with very random name/description on ebay while clicking for similar items. With proper keywords it was unsearchable. It took me forever to find this.
This is very cool, thank you. I just bought my first thin client box at a thrift store for next to nothing (Dell wyse 5060) and saw the M.2 WLAN port and thought, what a wasted opportunity to put an actual M.2 SATA there instead. I found it how to upgrade the hard drive and now I can expand onboard storage without having to resort to USB. Very timely!
i've just done the same very same thing with my 5060.
Absolutely interesting! I had no idea you could stick something else than a WiFi card into it!
This is awesome. I have some NUCs with this connector which are part of a multi arch k8s homelab and I will eventually upgrade the network to 2.5G so that particular adaptor jumped out. I'll have to check support but that could be seriously useful for me.
Peter, thank-you for this video!...I had this exact same question myself, and now you have answered it...jo'c
That was very cool!
I see some uses for the SIM card slot.
A couple of months ago, I was trying to find uses for the a/e slot in an old motherboard I had lying around. This video would have saved me a lot of time wasted on AliExpress.
Once I also found an A/E to B/M key adapter. It'd probably only work for sata m.2 drives (not nvme, those use more PCI lanes IIRC), but it's another use for the slot.
Very cool! Love niche products like these.
8:25 actually that last one, the M.2 E-key to Pci-e 16x slot(1x bandwith) could be very handy. Lots of boards don't have many usable pci-e slots, most entry/mid tier or even upper middle tier boards include a second full size slot but it's rendered useless because most people run their GPU on the primary and the second you insert a card in the secondary slot, regardless of how many pci-e lanes it uses, it'll split both slots to 8x lanes! This effectively halves the gpu bandwith to 8x, and if you only need 1x for your expansion card you're throwing away 7x pci-e lanes. Unless you have an extremely expensive creator card with pci-e bifurcation that is, but then again if you had that you'd have plenty pcie slots available anyway.
I use a pci-e usb expansion card, it's only 1x bandwith and it's a 1x sized but many similar 1x speed cards are actually full size pci-e. Since gamers usually use wired Ethernet anyway, a little adapter like that would put that useless M.2 E-key slot to work as a multi usb 3.0 port bracketed securely on the back of your pc leaving all your 16x lanes available for your GPU!
Would love a video like this about the normal M.2 slot and devices besides NVME's
Excellent video, super useful knowledge. Thank you for making this video!
Fiber also provides electrical isolation, overvoltage/lightning protection. For mission critical applications.
This is such a helpful video. I wish I would have known these options for an older Alienware computer. I hated that the wifi m.2 port didn't allow a full nvme drive.
love the mention of fellow tech channels! especially one as good as L1T! 💚
that SFP one looks amazing for something like SFF homelab for VMs or SAN/NAS, pfSense router etc. while using consumer hardware.
The SATA one also seems very useful for this exact same scenario - if you have a really tight fit and need low profile GPU or some other card for the only PCIe slot on mITX, but you also have 8 HDDs in the same case (maybe that is why it is such a tight fit), very rarely you get a mITX motherbaord with more than 4 SATAs. I found a 80mm one with 8 ports. But if the Mobo has a 30mm slot for wifi and you do not need it (as NAS will not really be sat on wifi) then this 2 SATA interfaces gives card you some extra storage options.
It genuinely seems that most of these are for enthusiasts, professionals or homelab users. The SD card/USB card again is something for a niche market, e.g. you generally boot ESXi of a USB stick or SD card. So if you want a tidy setup, you can mount them internally (I would use a USB 2.0 header and an internal interface that plugs into it instead). SIMcard seems like a good way to have a backup connection in case of outage for something that you need high availability on.
The only jank one is the PCIe x16 slot one lol.
Many thx, this is quite helpful!👍