They LIED to me! - DDR4 RAM to M.2 SSD Adapter

you know i rarely if ever have a chance to get bored because whenever i feel like 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 going to go out on a limb and say probably not the way that you'd expect but i'm sure what you were expecting was this segway to our sponsor glassware with glasswire you can instantly see your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your pc or android device use offer code linus and get 25 off glass wire at the link below [Music] okay so what we've got here if the product name is anything to go by is a ddr to m.2 hard disk adapter card sata to m.2 ng ffb 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 going to go ahead and pull out one of my memory sticks here and uh actually before we put this in let's 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 kind of 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 i don't blame you 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 so what we need is a sata m.2 drive with the correct keying for this type of slot so uh now that we're equipped with that let's try again shall we so here's our wd blue you can see that 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 uh hey isn't that why we're all here okay let's 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 wait man i'll plug this 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 24 gigs of ram because we did remove one of our 8 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'd expect it to show up as a normal say to 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 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 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 going to 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 going to 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 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 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 um 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 you know crazy uh 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 um 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 um 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 dim 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 uh 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 our sponsor for today's video is mass drop featuring the mass drop x bar dynamic dt 177x go headphones so bear dynamic if you're not familiar with them is a world-renowned german manufacturer and these ones feature a closed back design their latest generation of 45 millimeter tesla drivers a wide frequency range and weighty controlled base they're a favorite for recording studios and their 32 ohm impedance mean that they're easy to drive from portable sources without an amp they feature a durable design with aluminum ear cups a spring steel headband and metal yokes and hinges and you can click the link below and reserve your set today so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,327,061

Keywords: ddr4, m.2, adapter, ssd, storage, pc, sata, power, data

Id: swgNTR1jOvA

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Bod620]

When Linus has he’s test bench already there but picks it up and puts it back down just for the video.