ITP are items that would just be good to have. New mobos, or just wifi cards. If I find anything neat I’ll toss it in here.
Express card GPU Dock
Wireless N and USB 3.0 express card (laptop pcie slot)
Reserved SBC Testing / Review
Interest:
Latte panda
pi 4 4GB
RockPRO64
Itp is hesting msata drives, m. 2, and anything else that can be made compatible per system. I will post benchmarks of drives too, I just don’t have a bench set up rn is all.
mSata Drives
These need to be translated to an ATA/PATA/ZIDE/SIDE/mIDE bus
Crucial / Toshiba SSD - 128GB
The sticker was all goofed up when I got this drive so I peeled it off. The flash and the controller are the important parts anyways. This is the first mSata drive I will be testing in the b130 ever, and ever in an enclosure setup on a 133 bus. So this is rly exciting for me.
m.2 Drives
These need to be translated to an ATA/PATA/ZIDE/SIDE/mIDE bus
Needs research
NVMe Drives
These need to be translated to an ATA/PATA/ZIDE/SIDE/mIDE bus
These Likely need a bridge chip / titan ridge enclosure of some sort. Needs research.
mSata Enclosures
6/18/21
First controller in, I saw these and they were pretty much what I am looking for. Bonus tho, it came with a plastic cover when I didn’t think it would.
Someone mentioned about “oh no but china”. I would rate this board as safe. The sata controller on it can’t actually store anything, and theres no hidden traces otherwise.
JM20330 controller chip
No hidden traces.
Tho I thought this was weird. Theres a light perferation on the board on both sides. It isn’t thru hole either.
Just kinda weird.
Then I noticed something.
This cap is just BARELY bulging. Its never going to need to push enough power to an MSATA disk that its going to pop, so its safe to use. I’ve seen this before, and adrian black has talked about this. Basically this was probably a board used by a company for CNC machines or something, likely WAS an SSD of some sort, but has since been cannibalized in design. At that, I think this whole thing, even the board itself, is made out of recycled components. If this thing isn’t shit I’m buying more of these.
Link to work post below with tests —> X
m.2 Enclosures
NVMe Enclosures, Bridges, and Controllers
ITP is alternative mods or parts for things that you’d probably want in a modern machine.
https://www.parts-people.com/index.php?action=item&id=3702
Screen for Dell B130 with Ambient Light Sensor
Items to buy for this project:
This is mostly for my tracking, but these are things that I’m going to get in order to work on this shit more.
Soldering tools
Temp probe(s) and lead read
desktop/benchtop psu
Nifty; this sounds like the sort of project you see recounted in talks at hacker conferences, complete with war stories of why the OEM did __ and __, and how it was successfully reverse engineered.
Suggestions
Since this is in the #hardware, not the #blog section, I think there is a bit more of an expectation to explain your acronyms for passers-by the first time you use them.
PM - Pentium M
NHC - Notebook Hardware Control
PLA (in context of CPU/RAM) - ?
ITP - ?
ULV - Ultra Low Voltage?
SBC - Single Board Computer?
Also, while I am a bit biased because of the time I put into researching my RAM ranks post it may help to link back to the memory thread you mention.
Questions
What are you using as the storage device, if these are IDE/PATA?
I too have an old laptop, and was about to buy a Compact Flash card to go with the passive PATA-CF adapter I have, when the main candidates, 128 & 256 GB Kingston CF cards began going up in price, and then semi-recently were entirely discontinued.
Anything else that fits PATA or CF seems to be at least 3× reasonable SSD pricing.
Actually I was just thinking about this. I was going to put a table in the first post, I just don’t know how tables work on here XDDD
Nothing in it
I am still setting up posts, but for right now I am running a 40GB 7200RPM drive in the dell, but sitting here on my desk I have an msata disk. I have an MSATA controller in the mail, and I intend to test a lot of different controllers that are available online and bench each of them to see if they can match bus speed or not. Its super important that it does so you actually hit 133m/t. If you don’t you’ll have a pretty slow time moving data around on the pentium side.
Since there was a SBC involved though, and since you have things such as gigabit ethernet available, I was going to rig up some rsync stuff between machines and have user data stored on an SBC and other data either be handled strictly by the PM system, or by the SBC. How I will do this yet I don’t know but I’ll figure it out.
Going straight for pata compatible stuff is kinda… eh. I mean you don’t have so much lag because bus speeds will just match, but its still pata. That sorta hardware is kinda made on demand for industrial stuff, and the end user home computer stuff is like, do it when you can, but unimportant. So the prices go up literally just because they have to wait longer to get their SSD’s compared to like boeing, whoever they would be (transcend, OWC, ITL, etc)
Its a lot easier to go low power sata solutions and end up just saving battery power / having more power to dump into the cpu / ram / gpu.
By the way I’m scarfing down your ranks post today and going to start some of that research.
This is my wifes MSI U160 Netbook PC with a Intel Atom 1 core 2 thread up to 1.6Ghz with 1GB DDR2 ram…
Would you have any use for this? Has wifi, windows 7 code, battery works, wifi etc… it’s very old but it all still works. I removed the 2.5" sata drive for destruction, I left the screws for it under the ram cover so its all sealed. Has its charger as well.
Would this work for your project? If not there is a picture of the ram chip 
Woah, thats a weird little ram board.
Holy shit its a pentium 4 in a netbook
Oh dear god. Does it have battery life? I guess they woulda fixed that by 2010…
IDK actually. Maybe? Let me get back to you on that one. Might be too new. goal is literally what you can go to the dump and still buy a battery for that for some reason turns on. Literally being able to take anything and make it perform.
2010 is where stuff starts getting locked down, and netbooks are a bit tough anyways, at least for me.
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Well battery works… at least for boot etc…I was never able to log in. So I was just “sanitizing it.”
I thought of making a NAS with it, but might be a little underpowered for a 8 drive zfs setup.
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IDK put some CPU benches on it and give it an msata drive and see what happens. Might surprise you.
Think less about what it can’t do and think more about what can be done to completely ignore what is slow in the system. Theres always something that lets you cheat, you just have to think outside of the box with it.
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The other problem is making something work to get at least 6 sata attachments… Sure I could hotwire a pico or PSU, but the data lanes might be tough…
How many USB ports does it have
slash
does it have a firewire port, for some reason
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It has two, but its attached to the ribbon cable with audio and such on the left side on that custom board it looks like…
Well I guess you could be a bit crazy and find the USB lines and solder to them if you wanted to.
But uhhhhhh
lol
Does it have gigabit? I know of enclosures that exist that do over eth.
Other wisssseeeee… mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm breakout boards for sata exist but the only ones I know of are for 1 port into 2 ports…
yes…oh and a serial connection lol…correction 3 usbs…lol and a SD card slot lol
I’d investigate that ethernet port.
Also look into its bios and see if theres any bios mods out there. Is it an H2O based laptop or does it have something nice like AMI? (american megatrends)
You can probably depend on the 2 USB slots on the far side because thats a pretty wide ribbon cable, I’d expect them to have their own lines, but just be careful.
Boot
Well even if its not gigabit, try it it’ll probably still be faster. You basically have a folding northwood computer. Think of it that way.
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Not gigabit…just fast e… 10/100… Well was a thought. Thought I’d offer…LOL I need to clear out some junk… and a few PC’s
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I might take that ram, don’t think I can use the PC tho.
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Ok lemme know.
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