Background mumbo-jumbo, feel free to skip...
So, I have an old Dell Inspiron 1150 that I got as a xmas gift a while back. I already have two laptops that are significantly more powerful (Core i7 4810MQ, and Core 2 Duo T9600). The gift idea was a toy to tinker with, and after letting it sit for a while and not wanting to invest money in it, I've decided to breathe new life into an old machine.
This thing came with a 2.6GHz NetBurst Celeron CPU with a whopping 256MB of RAM and a 4200RPM IDE HDD. Now, I could get this thing to boot a super minimal Linux distro, but every time I open more than 1 webpage (not even that if the page is content-heavy), the thing will hang and freeze, due to paging (or swapping in my case) to a very old, very slow mechanical disk drive. It crawls so slow I have to hard restart.
I've decided to max out the RAM with a 2GB kit of DDR-333 RAM. I've also established I want an SSD, and found the perfect one: MyDigitalSSD SBe 128GB. However, it is a SATA-based M.2 and the laptop has an old 44 pin IDE interface... and M.2 confuses the ever-living-fuck out of me.
The Question (TL;DR)
Are M.2 SATA-based SSD's compatible with mSATA ports? I plan on using a M.2 SSD with a 44pin IDE to mSATA adapter.
M.2 and mSATA aren't (physically) compatible.
If you want a cheap mSATA SSD the Mushkin Atlas, Crucial M500, and Samsung 840 series are available in mSATA I believe for reasonable prices.
In any case, why not just use something like a WD Blue/Black if you want something fast? IDE maxes out at 133 MB/s if you're lucky, and WD Blues can hit 150 MB/s on a sustained load.
I went with the MyDigitalSSD Bullet Proof 4 Eco SSD. It was $7 more, but came in mSATA, and got an mSATA adapter. The reason why I won't go with mechanical drives is because A) IDE drives are expensive and B) the bulk of everyday performance is in random I/O which mechanical disks are quite poor at. I used a CompactFlash card as the primary system drive of an old Dell computer and it was stuck in UDMA 2 mode, which capped bandwidth to 33MB/s. That thing booted faster even 10k RPM HDD. It went from cold boot to desktop in about 25 seconds, again capped to 33MB/s. It's all in random I/O.
After the upgrade, the laptop was still very slow, and I ran into some stability issues. I'm guessing the adapter was a dud, or was running into chipset limitations. I ended up using the SSD in an USB 3.0 mSATA enclosure - may use to test out different Linux distros. I practically gave away the laptop after installing Vista, which was the latest Windows OS to have an official driver for the graphics driver.