Don't Overlook This Slot

if you clicked on this video you're probably familiar with pcie and in got two slots for storage and expansion but you might be overlooking this which is also an m.2 slot but a little bit different it's often just referred to as the Wi-Fi slot but it can actually do a lot more than that and today I'm going to try putting a few different modules in this often overlooked socket to try and get the most performance out of this PC so stay tuned thank you recently I was working on this HP Elite desk 800 G3 mini and sadly one of the Wi-Fi antennas had completely been ripped off now this wasn't a big deal because I typically use wired ethernet but it was kind of sad just looking at the poor little Wi-Fi card with only one cable connected but this kind of got me thinking about how as much as I love finding the most value in used computers I've possibly been overlooking a great opportunity this wi-fi slot is technically an m.2 e key slot you're probably familiar with m and b keyed m.2 sockets the m key slots are mostly used for nvme ssds and are what you see on most modern motherboards and B keyed m.2 slots are typically used for m.2 SATA ssds like this one here on my gecom mini it12 the e-keyed socket that we're talking about today isn't just limited to wireless cards it can support up to two pcie by one links USB 2.0 oh and a few other interfaces but there is a huge emphasis here on the word can not all m.2e sockets are equal just like how you can often find pcie by 16 slots that are actually only wired up as by 8 or by four it's up to the motherboard manufacturer to decide what all pins and interfaces should be wired up and active so this makes things a little bit tricky some older and cheaper wireless cards might only use USB 2.0 and newer wireless cards might actually use the cnvi interface if either of those are the case then the socket might not support pcie at all which makes it pretty much useless for anything other than Wi-Fi fortunately it's fairly easy to see what the socket is capable of using something like Hardware info 64 on Windows or lspci and Linux and I'll show you that here in a bit okay so really quick while I'm editing this video I realized I forgot to talk about white listing because some PC manufacturers will in fact whitelist only certain cards to work with their motherboards I have seen a lot of posts that claim that many of factors are whitelisting when in fact it's just that slot doesn't support pcie but there are examples of motherboards whitelisting only certain Wi-Fi cards to work in m.2 E key slots so make sure and just Google your motherboard or PC ahead of time and just know it is a risk and something you might run into all right back to the video now fortunately the ekeed m.2 slot here actually does support one lane of PCI Gen 2 which means we should be able to use quite a few different modules in here but what options are there for the E key well before we talk about that I want to take just a second to talk about the sponsor of today's video which is no one because it's actually just brought to you by my awesome patrons and YouTube members if you want to get some more Hardware Haven content like some behind the scenes content or just Early Access to videos you can spend as little as a dollar a month to become a patron or YouTube member and get quite a few little perks and also help support me as I make these videos also if you can't afford that or don't want to no worries I totally get it but if you do want to spend a dollar to help support the channel it's awesome I really appreciate it and yeah go check that out all right back to the video so what can this slot be used for well if it typically uses pcie for wireless networking then wired networking should definitely be an option so I picked up this two and a half gigabit Ethernet adapter I'm a huge fan of Two and a Half gigabit and I think this could be perfect for something like this Mini PC if you wanted to use it as a Home Server even if you're not storing a ton of data on this little guy there's a good chance you might be accessing Media or other files from a Nas and two and a half gigabit is great for speeding that up input 2 connections are obviously used for storage but not so much with the eKEY modules even if you could find an e-keyed SSD which I haven't you could possibly still run into issues booting from it but I did pick up a dual SATA port module which could be great for adding a few more SATA ports to a DIY Nas build of sorts there are plenty of other cool modules out there and you should actually check out this video here from Peter Brockie that I came across where he goes through quite a few options however the third module that I'm going to check out today is a bit different this is a coral m.2 accelerator which features a Google Edge TPU machine learning accelerator this can be used to accelerate a lot of different machine learning tasks but I'm going to try it out today with something called frigate frigate is an open source NVR that supports AI object detection and this is hopefully going to make that possible in my opinion this is by far the coolest and most practical option for something like this HP Mini PC as you could install Linux on an SSD add in a mechanical hard drive to store all your camera footage and then use the coral TPU to accelerate object detection and for pretty cheap I bought this HP for around 50 and the coral TPU was only another 30 or so toss in an SSD and or hard drive and you could have an NVR with AI object detection for around 100 bucks that's not bad however that's assuming I can get it all working but I feel pretty confident today so let's go over to the desk and start checking these out all right so I'm here at my desk sorry for the board production quality I have a camera behind me I have the little fuzzy guy on here A whole bunch of junk here and I forgot to start recording and started doing some stuff and I just don't want to have to go back and do it all over again so we have the HP Elite desk 800 G3 mini right here opened up and I actually went ahead and put the two and a half gigabit Ethernet adapter in um I did pop out this display port on the back and I was hoping I'd be able to mount this up somehow but it doesn't fit because of the screw holes here on the bottom it's hard to see probably but it doesn't quite fit so it's just going to kind of dangle out the back and that's where we're at so I'm gonna go ahead and wire this up really quick so that we can test it out I have windows installed on this in vme SSD here all right we got everything wired up time to hit the start button and see what happens I'm gonna hit F9 here all right we'll just select the SSD just to make sure we're on Windows okay and I'm going to open up Hardware info 64. before you actually try out our network interface and if we go up here to bus and expand this we should be able to eventually find and we're at probably under this PCI Express route hey look there we go we have our real Tech semiconductor rtl8125 two and a half gigabit Ethernet controller and if we click on this PCI Express route Port we can see some interesting things here we can see the version of pcie so 3.0 and the maximum link width which is by one which is what we'd expect with this m.2 e key slot as it supports two lanes or two links of buy one PCI gen in this case three so that looks good and if we go down to the actual module here we can see the PCI version is two and then the maximum length is one which is what we would expect and this is just fine PCI Gen 2 I believe I could be quite wrong here but I think with pcie Gen 2 i1 we'd get about 4 000 gigabit per second so two and a half gigabit should be totally fine now if you do this on Linux it's a little bit different or at least Debian in my case you can use lspci and then do Dash VV for more verbose and then when you find the device you're looking for you should be able to see the link capabilities I believe and then also see the link status and you can look at the width and that'll show you whether or not your m.2 e key slot actually supports pcie or not so in this case it does and we magically already have this setup well not magically Windows was running for a second and probably already has drivers ready to go so we can go to device manager and if we go to network adapters we can see our Realtek pcie two and a half gigabit family controller so I'm going to get this set up really quick make sure it's on the right static IP and stuff for how I have my two and a half gigabit network setup and we'll test this out and see how fast it actually goes all right so I've got everything set up I'm actually on my Nas here and I can go down to for example this Elite desk 800 G3 mini and try copying over this video and see what happens and there we go we're not quite getting the full two and a half gigabit but that's probably just a read speed limitation from the nas if I had to guess let's try doing a bigger file I don't think that's going to help at all but we can try yeah so if we try copying this we're getting close to that 300 megabit per second but we're definitely getting two and a half gigabit per second we're getting better than gigabit per second all right so two and a half gigabit clearly works it's a little bit awkward here just hanging out the back but it does work so now I'm going to move on to the coral TPU several days later okay so I'm back it's been a few days actually because I messed up my grub bootloader by running Windows and then switching back to Linux so I got that fixed thanks to Chris Titus Tech appreciate it um but yeah we have Debian back up and running and all the setup for frigate was done off camera just because it was going to take a lot of figuring out I'll probably have some of that on here but basically I set up pertainer so that I'd have a easy way of running Docker compose because I'm not as familiar with actual Docker compose but I set up for tainer and then set up a Docker compose or a stack and portainer for frigate following their guide and then once I had that running I set up my cameras to work with this and yeah it seems like everything showed up if I actually go into oh I can't really go and do it from here yeah I can go to free it and go to my entry here and this hasn't been running so there's not a whole lot but down here in snapshots we can actually see it detected me walking up to my front door I'm actually kind of curious we'll see if the audio audio works I have a feeling the audio is not working but hello I'm the person did it work let's find out all right let's see if that worked hey looky here now it didn't seem to pick up that there was a dog there but it did pick up person all right so we have the coral TPU actually working and I actually got it [Music] oh my goodness you try opening a bag on camera all right there we go I actually got the SATA adapter here so I'll put it up where you can see so nvme e to dual SATA and we'll see how all that works let's try it out all right I need power I have the five dollar power supply right here let's get this guy hooked up it should be fine for now it should be enough okay so I've got a whole bunch of stuff hooked up over here we have a return of the five dollar power supply I've got it hooked up with the old not sure if you can see this but the paperclip test here I'm going to go ahead run power it's a little bit janky and I'm probably zoomed in a little tight to be able to see it all but you can kind of see got my hard drives here plugged in this is this is so janky man okay and hopefully nothing explodes drives have power turn the system on and hopefully we can just get a boot into Debian this is my temporary fix to get into Debian uh why is the display being weird is it like a power thing from the other power supply what's going on the display is being weird so we're into Linux but we're getting weird display stuff a few minutes later okay so I'm ssh in here where we can actually see that we have our two two terabyte drives here and they seem to be recognized I always forget this all right cool so as you can see in the screen share I'm probably showing you I was able to mount a file system on one of these drives at least and copy some files over and it works so yeah but this seems to be causing some weird issues with the display as you can see here there's there's no video coming out so I'm not sure I guess I could try a different DisplayPort that doesn't seem to help either you're kidding wow okay hold on oh shoot okay that may have been a bad idea I'm pretty sure I tripped my AFC I break her but it did in fact when I shorted ground on the two cases the display actually worked so yeah some sort of grounding issue I assume with the hard drives and this computer but technically it worked might be a little tricky trying to sort out a project using this but it technically seems to work so three for three maybe I guess anyway I think that about wraps it up for this one once again this may not work on a lot of PCS it really just depends on the motherboard so use something like Hardware info to go and check and see with the Wi-Fi card plugged in to see if it has those pcie Lanes or if it's using some other technology and still probably no guarantees that this stuff will work on any given motherboard I think I got lucky that it happened to work with this one but your results May Vary but it's still cool especially on a small computer that you could potentially do some more cool things with it thanks to that extra slot like especially the cruelty Pew thing is really cool I think being able to set this up to be a simple NVR with a boot drive dpu and then maybe an extra say to drive for some storage that could be really cool I think that could be a great use for something like this form factor so I think that's about it thank you guys so much for watching especially patrons and members I really appreciate the extra support but even for you guys that don't no worries I appreciate you for watching watching this and liking it and doing all that great stuff so seriously thank you guys so much I'd love to get to do what I do stay curious and I can't say and I can't wait to see you in the next one [Music] thank you

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 151,776

Keywords: m.2 e key, m.2 e, what can i do with wifi slot, can i use wifi slot for pcie, 2.5Gb networking, coral tpu, frigate nvr, SATA adapter, m.2 E card, pc building, tinkering

Id: 4TsJ7t7IBiw

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023