Mini pcie SSD for m11x

I remember seeing a thread somewhere on here a while ago, over a year, about trying to use one of these in an m11x and I think it was determined at the time they wouldn't work.

I was just wondering if anything has changed, if there's newer types out etc etc and if there's anyway to get one working in an m11x. I have an R1 and would kill to have a SSD in it, however a 2.5" is just so impractical in this laptop imo when there is only one HDD bay and larger SSDs are so expensive. This would (theoretically) be the perfect solution, however I don't have 100 bucks to just go out and spend and pray it works. I was hoping maybe someone on here has tried it before, or has more info on it.

 

Nope. Nothing has changed in the past year. This isn't possible in any way that is worth doing.

The miniPCIe port on the Alienware M11x R1 is connected to a USB controller, not a disk controller. Even if you could somehow get a miniPCIe SSD in there, it would operate at USB 2.0 speeds at most. That defeats the speed benefit of running an SSD to begin with.

The ideal solution for someone like you would be Intel SRT (Smart Response Technology), which takes a small <60GB SSD and uses it as a smart cache in front of a mechanical HDD. However, we're about a year or two out from seeing that kind of configuration widely implemented in notebooks.

 

I thought the XT drive had that config?

 

Isn't the XT actually only like 4gbs of solid state and the rest a typical mechanical HDD? I was always unsure of how those actually worked although they do seem like the only/best solution unless you don't mind low space or have a lot of money for a big ssd.