Form factors seem to change for many instruments at shorter intervals nowadays. It's conceivable that in the not-too-distant future internal SSDs won't be made in the rectangular enclosures which have been predominant; a changeover to the smaller form factor of mSATA, m.2 NGFF SATA & ever-evolving small-form plug-ins will predominate, to fit into the slimmer laptop PCs which have been gaining an increasing presence in stores, & in users' hands. There are too many fine older-form laptops with strong user allegiance (including this reviewer), and Ablecomm is one of a few makers of adapters which will put the newer 'SSD's on cards', so to speak, into the typical size PC's of most recent (and, some older) build. What makes Ablecomm's adapter for the 2.5" SATA space a champ is a combo of features: 1. its solid aluminum frame; 2. it has room for either a mini-size mSATA drive, or a M.2 NGFF 'long-stick'-shape SSD, resembling a RAM form for desktop PC's. You can insert both types at the same time, but only the M.2 form will operate. The only reservation I have about this item is that it is 'open-shell', like a car chassis with no body. However, the SSD cards will fit snugly, in any event. I've used another version of this to insert a SSD into an IDE-form Dell Inspiron 600m (an old workhorse from around 2004, along with its Vostro equivalent). I'm going to use Ablecomm's contender in a few Inspiron 15's at home. All in all, Ablecomm has made a quality item, soon to become a necessity for those of us who fight the good fight against planned obsolescence --successfully.

I have tried the white adapter which are abundantly available from ebay and it caused my Satellite A70-S259 to lock up when formatting my 128gb Samsung msata drive during Windows 7 32 bit home premium installation. So I tried the clone method which seemed to work ok and had read speeds around 74mbps and write speeds around 69mbps. Then when it came to restarting the laptop it would lock up again but this time at the windows boot logo. Doing some more research I found that the generic white ebay adapters typically have the JMicron chipset in them which causes a lot of compatibility in issues between certain laptops and msata drives. One person from a forum recommended to purchase an adapter that has the Marvell chipset which this adapter does have. This adapter is pretty much identical the Aleratec version but sold out cause I waited too long to make a decision whether to invest into an old laptop. Thankfully this Ableconn's version worked out PERFECTLY and fit like a glove in my Toshiba! Windows installed fast and without a hitch! Now I'm getting 94mpbs and 77mbps writes speeds! Boot times are just over 15 seconds, outstanding! Boot time with the original IDE 60gb 4200 rpm hard drive was around 1 1/2 minutes. Get yours today as I worry about if these great adapters will be eventually be phased out as old technology relics of the past have. Was shipped quickly but unfortunately USPS decided to throw the packaged envelope on my front lawn and was buried underneath a few inches of snow from a storm that just rolled through that same day. Couldn't find it until 2 days later with a flashlight but obviously wasn't Ableconn's fault just the delivery person must have had a bad day I guess. Nonetheless, it survived being out in the cold and works flawlessly! Thank you Ableconn, your adapter is fairly priced and breathed new life into my gently used laptop! P.S. Keep making these things, I'm sure people will continue to buy them! Take care!

I tried a cheaper mSATA/IDE adapter and while other computers to read and write to the mSATA, the Apple iBook G4 (circa 2005) did not recognize it.

Remove your old IDE drive and add a IDE-USB adapter, then use linix dd commend to make a drive image. Then take a mSATA and insert it into this adapter, then add a USB to IDE adapter, you can use linux dd to write the image.

At that point, you can install this adapter/mSATA card into your old computer, it should boot up, and you are done. I used a Kingston 256GB mSATA. Even with an IDE ATA-100 interface, going solid state will have everything load three times faster, double the data transfer rate, and reduce seek times to negligible levels. These measurements are compared to an old Samsung 2.5" 160GB hard drive on an Apple iBook G4.

I have quite a few of these, maybe a dozen, and like them a lot. I never had any problem with one, or at least never thought I did. I use these in both Windows boxes and Linux servers, and they're pretty much set and forget, well that's the theory anyway. So recently I reused a box that had been a Linux box and installed Windows on it, I wanted it to be essentially a clone of another box, which also had one of these in it, so I removed one of the SSDs from the source box and put it in the new box and then wiped 2 more SSDs to mirror to, one for each box. All worked great, seemingly, I had two boxes that were essentially clones of each other. Then I ran the utility software to make sure the mirrors to the unallocated SSDs happened as expected. Source system? no problem. The clone, well no, just a controller listed, no SSDs at all. swapped the SSDs side to side,, doesn't boot. swapped them into another of these carriers and everything then works as expected.

So it's one bad one, no biggy right? well no, it's not that simple. This can be used as a driverless product and on Linux that is the only option, and this is how this particular one had been used for a couple years. When did it stop recognizing the 2nd SSD? No idea. There was no fault light lit on it, it didn't stop seeing the primary drive, just stopped seeing the secondary, and this is bad.

Using these is insurance, and using them on an OS that doesn't see them is trust, and if that diagnostic indicator LED doesn't detect a fault in the board itself, well that's trust in something that might not be trustable. I would much rather the product fail completely then fail but seemingly be fine. Fact is there was no mirror there, and for how long, I have no idea, everything appeared fine. I won't stop using them, I won't stop buying them, I just ordered a replacement for that bad one in fact, but I know now that periodically swapping out an SSDs then switching them side to side a wile later is required to really be able to trust them (or just swap them around so that they can be verified with the Windows utility).

I always try to use SSDs with different histories in my mirrors to prevent simultaneous failures, which is a real problem with mirrored SSDs as with identical writes will tend to fail very near to each other. All the SSDs I use in these are all identical Samsung EVOs and as boot drives I've actually never had one fail, although as media drives I've lost several and no longer use them that way. So risk is actually probably fairly minimal, but as th old Russian proverb says "Doveryai, no proveryai" Trust but verify.

The item arrived right on schedule. It was easy to put in a mSATA SSD, and the unit went into my 2005 PowerBook G4 easily. Because of the open framework of the adapter, I put a piece of electrical tape where the ribbon cable came in contact with the edge of the adapter to protect the cable from resting on the metal edge. The PowerBook booted right up in record speed and is running better than ever. I'm very happy with my purchase and will certainly buy another if the need arises.