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I have just two SATA slots in my motherboard and both are occupied. I want to add a SSD. So I thought that if the expansion slot shown in the image is a mini PCIe ( I am not sure) then I could just hook up an adapter to add more SATA slots. HP says here that it is a half length mini card, but I was unable to find any details about it on the internet.

So someone please enlighten me about what kind of Expansion Slot it is....

Image of the slot which HP says Half Length Mini Card

ZygD
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Suman De
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2 Answers2

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It may be a PCI Express Mini Card.

The host device supports both PCI Express and USB 2.0 connectivity, and each card may use either standard. Most laptop computers built after 2005 use PCI Express for expansion cards; however, as of 2015, many vendors are moving toward using the newer M.2 form factor for this purpose.

A "Half Mini Card" (sometimes abbreviated as HMC) is also specified, having approximately half the physical length of 26.8 mm.

But it could be mSATA too:

Despite sharing the Mini PCI Express form factor, an mSATA slot is not necessarily electrically compatible with Mini PCI Express. For this reason, only certain notebooks are compatible with mSATA drives.

Some notebooks [...] use a variant of the PCI Express Mini Card as an SSD. This variant uses the reserved and several non-reserved pins to implement SATA and IDE interface passthrough, keeping only USB, ground lines, and sometimes the core PCIe x1 bus intact. This makes the "miniPCIe" flash and solid-state drives sold for netbooks largely incompatible with true PCI Express Mini implementations.

I think this motherboard was used in some HP prebuilt? Try to find out which one and google for its manual.

gronostaj
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I just found the same slot on a tossed away HP Desktop I'm resurrecting. Mine is this one, and you can see the slot directly below the board number, "MS-7613":

https://support.hp.com/au-en/document/c02014355

Under "expansion slots", it lists, "One PCI Express x1 minicard socket".

Having tried various storage drives in older units of this same vintage, it'll likely be that you can only install a wifi card (possibly a wifi/BT combo). The giveaway to me is the single lock-down screw. Issue then is that wifi cards have 2 antenna posts. So even if you do have a wifi card in a drawer somewhere, you'll still need to come up with a way to get an antenna connected from somewhere.

Tracy LF
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