d430 and mini9 ssd?

I'm really curious about this. I own the latitude d430, and happen to have a mini9 64gb pci-e hard disk lying around.
For those of you familiar with the two laptops, the mini9 SSD's are a pci-e card, and the d430 happens to have two internal pci-e slots. As in one for wireless, and one for... well, wwan is what it's *for*, but I think you know where I'm going with this.

Anyways my SSD appears to be DOA (runcore model with usb interface, won't pick up on the usb, so I think it's dead) so I'm putting in an rma, but if that could be used as a hard disk in my d430, I'd be absolutely extactic- even if I couldn't use it as the boot device, I've got the 40gb regular 1.8" hdd in here that could handle booting and then just run everything off the ssd, it'd be great. Lots of space, and lots of speed. (something like 70mb/s read and 40 write)

I've done a few searches here and a load of research on google, but I've not come up with anything conclusive either way. I'm almost tempted to just stick it in and try, but but if I kill my second one of these drives ($220) the company probably won't want to send me a third.

Anyone know anything about this, or where I might start my research?

 

*bump*
Anyone? I cant really find any information that might push me in one direction or the other.
You'd think more people would be wondering, there are many laptops with multiple slots!

 

Runcore 1.8 inch SSD's are not compatable the the D420/430 or the Sony TZ series - I had one and had to return it

 

Any idea why? I'd like to know if its hardware or BIOS related. If they made a hardware incompatable card for the same slot I'd be very upset.

 

Incompatable ZIF connector.

 

It's a mini pci-e slot, and it's physically the same connector between the mini9's SSD and any other half length wifi/wwan card slot...

 

I went ahead and tried this with a RunCore 50mm 32GB SSD (RCP-I-M5032-C). I had to trim the USB flange by about 1mm to clear the PCIe slot in the D430. I tried the WWAN slot first. Once installed, it didn't show up at all. I checked in Linux, and it's not even on the PCIe bus at all, according to 'lspci'. I then tried the WLAN slot, same problem, didn't show up at all on the PCI bus. So, I'd say that this doesn't work, and that there must be something proprietary about these PCIe slots.

I don't have a Mini9 to test this card in, so I suppose it's possible that the card is dead, but it's brand new, so that's kind of unlikely. I'll try to find somewhere to test the card in the next few days and reply to the thread if it is in fact a bad card.

I've also tried a "266x" CF card in a 32-bit PC-Card reader in the D430 -- this worked, but the performance was abysmal for random I/O, which is the problem I'm looking to solve. SD card slot is next, but I don't have high hopes.

 

Update: The RunCore Mini9 SSD doesn't work in an EEE 1002HA, either (also a WLAN slot), so there must be something special about the Dell Mini-PCIe SSD slots... or I have a bad card.

 

I believe these DELL mPCIe SSDs are actually using a MiniPCIe to USB adapter onboard the SSD card, so there may be some problems using them in other PCs where the MiniPCIe bus doesn't support this. The Mini drives have problems even in other MiniPCIe-drive-equipped netbooks.

Definetely something strange going on with the bus connection there.

 

I just tried a known good PCIe SSD in a D420 and it did not work at all.

I also tried taking the the PCIe Drive out of the Mini SSD slot and trying it in the mini WLAN slot and the Mini did not see it at all.