mSATA vs. mini PCIe

[Carson Dyle]

It's not clear to me if there's a difference in connectors, or if mSATA drives just use a mini PCIe connector. Can anyone explain the difference or the relationship?

 

[DesiPower]

Found this image online, maybe they are the same?

 

[DesiPower]

nvm found this on Wikipedia

Mini PCI Express & mSATA

Despite sharing the mini-PCI Express form factor, an mSATA slot is not necessarily electrically compatible with Mini PCI Express. For this reason, only certain notebooks are compatible with mSATA drives. Most compatible systems are based on Intel's Sandy Bridge processor architecture, using the Huron River platform. But for a mSATA/mini-PCI-E connector, the only prerequisite is that there is a switch which makes it either a mSATA or a mini-PCI-E slot and can be implemented on any platform.

Notebooks like Lenovo's T-Series, W-Series, and X-Series ThinkPads released in March–April 2011 have support for an mSATA SSD card in their WWAN card slot. The ThinkPad Edge E220s/E420s, and the Lenovo IdeaPad Y460/Y560 also support mSATA.[11]

Some notebooks (notably the Asus Eee PC, the Apple 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.[12] This makes the 'miniPCIe' flash and solid state drives sold for netbooks largely incompatible with true PCI Express Mini implementations.

Also, the typical Asus miniPCIe SSD is 71 mm long, causing the Dell 51 mm model to often be (incorrectly) referred to as half length. A true 51 mm 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.

Intel has numerous desktop boards with the PCIe ×1 Mini-Card slot which typically do not support mSATA SSD. A list of desktop boards that natively support mSATA in the PCIe ×1 Mini-Card slot (typically multiplexed with a SATA port) is provided on the Intel Support site.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Ok. So ... the slots are identical, but the mobo must be designed to use an mSATA drive in a particular slot.

 

[piasabird]

I think one thing is MSATA takes up a full length PCIE card. I think I have seen some kits that let you put the MSATA drives in a frame and used like a 2.5" SATA hard drive. I think the pins are different.
There is a gigabyte B85 chipset Mini-ITX Motherboard that has a full length MSATA Mini PCIE Slot.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128680

There may be more to it than that.

Here is an adapter?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817999033