You know, I rarely, if ever, have a chance to get bored
because whenever I feel it coming on,
all I need to do is fire up a web browser
and then descend into what I call
a related products black hole
until I find something so mind-bendingly weird or stupid
that I know that I simply must have one
so I can try it out and share it with you guys.
And because my websites of choice for these descents
are ones like Taobao, AliExpress, Deal Extreme, and eBay,
it is usually quite affordable and doesn't take that long.
So without further ado,
I present to you my latest find,
the DDR4 memory to M.2 SSD drive adapter.
How does it work?
Well, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say,
probably not the way that you'd expect.
But I'm sure what you were expecting
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Okay, so what we've got here,
if the product name is anything to go by,
is a DDR2 M.2 hard disk adapter card
sated to M.2 NGFFB key memory slot SSD expansion card.
So what I gather from all of that
is that we are adapting a DDR4 memory slot
to an M.2 SSD drive slot.
So I guess we should probably go get
one of each of those things and give this a shot, shall we?
Okay, so we've got our test bench,
we've got our M.2 SSD,
and we've got our bizarre adapter.
So I'm gonna go ahead and pull out
one of my memory sticks here.
And actually, before we put this in,
let's install an SSD on it.
So they helpfully include this screwdriver.
Put that into the, uh-oh.
Oh, we seem to have a slight problem here, Houston.
This does not fit in.
How about if we try it the other way?
No, even though it kinda looks like it'll go in,
that still doesn't work.
So what could be the problem here?
I mean, other than that this is completely insane.
All right, so we've missed something here.
We did a bit of an explainer on this a while back,
but don't blame me for not watching it.
It was kind of boring.
But M.2 is just a physical slot,
and it can actually accept drives
that use both the newer NVMe protocol
and the older SATA-type drives.
All we need is a SATA M.2 drive
with the correct keying for this type of slot.
So now that we're equipped with that,
let's try again, shall we?
So here's our WD Blue.
You can see that, aha!
Indeed, this does install now.
Go ahead and grab our screw.
Oh, look at that.
Our free screwdriver is even, oh!
It's even magnetic.
Not very magnetic, mind you, just a little magnetic.
Okay, so there it is.
It feels a little like complete madness,
and maybe it is, but hey, isn't that why we're all here?
Fire it up, shall we?
Oh, this is actually my first time
using my test bench in the new office.
I need to turn on my UPS.
I need to plug in my UPS.
Hey!
There we go, all right.
All right, you crazy little adapter.
Show me your magic.
Reveal to me your secrets.
Okay, so as we'd expect, we're down to, oh, wow.
All right.
We're down to 24 gigs of RAM
because we did remove one of our eight gig sticks.
And as far as our storage drives go,
we've got a whole lot of nothing going on here.
Perhaps then that's why they included this.
I think it was supposed to be red,
but it actually ended up kind of pink, didn't it?
Ah, SATA cable in the package.
So let's shut her down and plug this baby in.
Okay, so now that we're just using a SATA cable,
we don't expect it to show up as a normal SATA drive,
but the thing is there's still nothing.
Nada.
All right, so here's the thing.
There are actually a lot of different ways
that an adapter can function.
So you know how if you buy a travel adapter
for your electronic devices,
there are the bulky ones that actually convert
from 220 volts to 110 volts
versus the simple ones that just physically change
the shape of the prongs on your device.
So if you want to change the shape of the prongs
on your device to fit into another socket,
well, those rely on the user to double check
if their device has a universal input switching power supply
kind of like this one.
So the same kind of rules apply for computer adapters,
and there are a number of different main kinds.
The first one is what I call physical adapters,
and these are very simple.
Actually, here, I can grab one right now.
This right here is a USB-C adapter.
This is a USB-C adapter. This is a USB-C adapter.
This is a USB-C adapter.
And here, you can plug in a USB type A
to USB Micro B adapter cable.
And while Micro B does actually...
This is fun fact.
Have an extra conductor in the tip.
It's only for sensing if a device
that would normally be the target
is supposed to act as a host.
So this functionality was built for USB on the go, or OTG,
and allowed you to plug accessories like network cards
into devices like phones and tablets.
For the vast majority of use cases though,
that extra pin lies dormant.
And all this cable does is run the same four conductors,
power, ground, and then two data wires
to two different shaped plugs.
No modifications to the signal whatsoever
are actually taking place.
The second main kind of adapter
is a little bit more complicated.
I'm gonna call these signal mode adapters,
for lack of a better term.
These take some connector and convert it into another one
that is totally different, but natively supported.
These types of adapters
tend to be relatively inexpensive still,
thanks to the fact that the processing is being done
on the computer or the device side.
The last main adapter I'm gonna talk about
is what I will call a complete adapter.
These take an entirely unrelated signal
and then actively convert it to something else in real time.
An example of that is this.
So this would be something like an HDMI to VGA adapter.
HDMI has no legacy analog mode of operation
and a VGA display device has zero understanding whatsoever
of digital signaling.
So these types of adapters tend to be more expensive
due to the required processing power,
like there will be chips inside.
They tend to be bulkier for the same reason,
and they also tend to be more expensive.
They also tend to be directional, only working one way.
So this one will take the HDMI port on your laptop
and convert it to a VGA cable for that projector
in the old conference room,
but it would not go the other way around.
It's also common for these to require
an external power source in order to function,
depending on what type of connection is being converted
and whether it has power pins that can be utilized.
So back to the topic at hand then.
This device is a VGA adapter.
This device was far less interesting
than I had initially hoped right after I clicked on it.
The geek in me would have absolutely loved to see
some kind of crazy way to use a high-speed memory interface
with a standard SSD.
The issue is that such a product would have to have been
designed from the ground up for that type of access,
like Intel's Optane DIMMS,
that they actually, I think, just finally started releasing,
because a normal computer would have no idea
what to do with a storage device plugged into a memory slot.
The interfaces are absolutely nothing alike.
Once I accepted that my pipe dream wasn't happening,
I decided I would still be pretty happy
with having my drive powered by the memory slot
with only a SATA data cable required
in order to get it working,
which is to say that I was pretty disappointed,
when I figured out what was actually going on here.
And I kind of wondered why they bothered
to mount this thing on a DIMM at all,
because if you look closely near the pins here,
you'll actually see that none of them are connected
to any traces on the printed circuit board,
which means that we're pretty much just wasting
the gold plating on these connectors,
and we could have just as easily double taped this thing
to the side of another component,
or left it hanging off of the cables,
making this, I would say,
somewhere in between a type one and type two adapter,
because we're pretty much just taking these pins
and converting them,
it looks like we're doing a little bit of something to it,
to these pins over here.
The good news is that once it's all hooked up correctly,
our drive does indeed show up.
Here's our 500 gig drive,
and we can probably even boot to it.
So M.2 SATA folks, there it is.
I'm just a little disappointed,
because I had hoped there was a little bit more
exotic technology going on,
and this is pretty much just a simple physical adapter.
Oh well.
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