Slightly aged PCIe-enabled equipment intended for computer networking applications often feature miniPCIe slots. Adding storage capability to this type of device can be difficult.
Even if one or more of the mini PCIe slots are SATA-enabled availability of fitting mSATA SSDs is continually becoming worse as mSATA SSDs have started to drift into obscurity.
Tobias Schramm has a project is aimed at providing an option for fast, high reliability NVMe-based storage in devices that do not have any M.2 Key M but only mini PCIe slots.
One example of such a device is the PCengines APU2, an AMD64 network platform with up to two PCIe-enabled miniPCIe slots.
A bit of care has to be taken when selecting a SSD compatible with the adapter. It only supports 2230 and 2242 M.2 PCIe SSDs. The more common 2280 size is not supported due to size constraints.
Depending on the device the adapter is to be used in even 2242 M.2 SSDs might not fit. I’ve had good success using Samsung PM991 NVMe SSDs.
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