A heads up as much as anything, Though I could do with an adapter to connect a M2 SSD to a desktop, any recommendations? Anyone had joy with a USB one?
I'm selling a laptop on eBay, Buyer is asking me what size the SSD is and we are getting argumentative as I tell him there isn't one (i've taken the drives out see) and they are saying there's one in the pics.
And there is. I've pulled the back off again and there's a little board the size of my thumb screwed onto the mainboard. That could have been a privacy nightmare.
There are M.2 SATA drives and M.2 NVMe drives, which are entirely different things in the same form factor. Be sure to get the right USB adapter for the drive you have. I haven't tried any personally, but assume they're OK.
That's probably the wifi/Bluetooth card. Does it have extra antenna cables connecting to it?
It would have been. Much safer if you can't connect to the internet :)
It won't run anything like as fast over USB though. Even a good SSD these days can completely saturate a SATA III 6Gb/s channel. M2 is faster still provided that your hardware can handle it.
In a desktop that doesn't have an M2 adapter on the motherboard you are better off using a PCi adapter card with it to get the performance. eg.
formatting link
(not a recommendation I have no idea if that one is any good or not)
I don't know if you can ever tell what has been left intact on a formatted SSD, but it would probably require specialist hardware to extract so it probably doesn't matter unless it is very secret.
You can boot the PC using a linux live cd or USB stick and used dd to write zeros to the whole drive. It won't delete any remapped blocks but for all practical purposes it will be sufficient. For example: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress where sda may be something else depending on your system.
You can find out about the drive with: sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda (or whatever the drive is called)
I'm utterly confused. You've had this laptop for ages, without realising there's an extra disk in there? Doesn't that mean you've never used it, and there won't be anything on it?
Surely, you'd see it in the BIOS screen? Or in My Computer, if using Windows?
I have put the 'drive' in another very similar laptop and booted into the Windows 10 that was on it. There's the facility to reset with 2 options, a quick one and a longer one that claimed to be OK if selling on. It's been at it a fair while so that's encouraging.
There wasn't much of concern on it anyway, just some work stuff, so that should suffice.
+1. the wear levelling algo means that neither reformatting or writing to it will erase all the data, conversely any write will either erase a whole block, or simply add to empty space.
In short just delete files and stop worrying, or physically destroy it.
Not that it really matters publicly but I bought it a few years ago and spilled a drink in it not that long after (nodded off late at night, drink in hand), put it in the laptop graveyard with some others. It had windows on it, I put Ubuntu on it.
The missus rounded them up in a bag for life that we could barely lift and told me to get shut. So they are going on ebay.
I recalled it having a small SSD and another drive in it but there were no apparent drives in it at this time, leaving me assuming i'd removed two drives from it.
Although it transpires there is this non-apparent (to me) drive.
A mate bought a mains powered adaptor (USB output) which is claimed to accept all drives from IDE on. Certainly takes IDE and SATA and looked to have lots of slots for other things.
I got one (can't remember if it was Amazon or eBay - maybe even ebuyer ?)
PSU and cradle that takes SATA, ATA IDE and something else.
Invaluable for pulling data off old drives.
Although my most recent attempt ended in abject failure. Seems you can't mount an encrypted Linux home partition onto a machine with the same partition name. Ouch.
Yup, M2 format drives are dinky little PCBs with a connector on the end. Typically about 3/4" wide and then length can vary, but many are around
2.5" or so but can be shorter. Its becoming quite common to have mounting points and connectors onboard for them these days.
You can get get USB adaptors to access them, however you need to be aware there are a two supported interfaces on M2 drives: SATA and NVMe (aka PCIe or PCI Express). The former are generally cheaper and suffer the same limitation that you get with decent "normal" SSDs on a 6GB/s SATA interface, that the drive can saturate the interface, and limit your throughput to around 550MB/s. The NVMe ones can run faster and will often manage ~3.5GB/s
(The drive connectors usually keyed to prevent you getting the wrong type of drive into the slot - two notches in the end of a SATA, an one notch on the NVMe).
The adaptors for the SATA version are usually quite cheap. The NVMe ones tend to be better made and often made in the form of a fairly close fitting Ali machining or extrusion, that acts as a heat sink for the drive (the fast ones can run fairly hot. So expect to pay £30 or so for a NVMe/USB-C or USB3 caddy. SATA ones are £10 - £ normally.
Can you show us a picture of the label on this drive ?
If we had the make and model number of the laptop, it might be possible to scan the specs and look for "suspicious constructs", such as Robson cache. Intel has tried, multiple times, to make what it thought were whizzy acceleration features.
formatting link
Some of those whizzy features, if you just pull one of those gadgets out of the laptop, it damages the integrity of storage on one of the real storage devices. You cannot be careless or in a hurry, when playing around inside some of the more expensive laptops. They are a bit too whizzy for their own good.
Some of these features are similar to a RAID1 Mirror. And rely on the Intel RST driver to work properly.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.