DeltaDon
Veteran Member
I have a stack of not configured NOS in the OEM box Pentium One laptops left over from my long ago closed laptop business. With suitable prodding from the wife I've been trying to come up bits and pieces necessary to turn them into complete working machines and to do so at a reasonable cost. One glaring issue is the lack of PATA 8GB (or smaller) hard drives or a cheap replacement for a spinning drive. I've tried CF cards with some success and will continue to look for deals on CF cards in the future. The first problem I had to solve with CF's was the issue of them reporting as portable disks and therefore not able to be boot disks. I solved that using Rufus software. I've also tried to use a few larger CF's and had to use Ontrack to partition the drives once Rufus worked it's magic on the cards. A all well and good solution, but I am always on the outlook for other solutions too. One day I was on the big auction site and stumbled upon a seller selling 18 postage stamp sized Apacer 8GB M2 SSD's for a very very reasonable price. That was a few months ago and I ordered up some M2 to 44 pin adapters to try using them in lieu of the CF cards. Problem after problem getting them working. Rufus (used to load DOS) kept reporting them as being 16GB's in size. WTF? So I tried a different M2 adapter thinking the Chinese messed up the electronics. Nope. Still FUBAR. A few months and some health issues I'm back at it and am using some different software attempting to format the SSD's so they'd behave and be 8GB drives. Well, the problem was they aren't 8GB drives. They are 64GB drives that somebody partitioned as 8GB drives with the remaining space not allocated. 
So now I'm digging around for more 4-8 GB CF cards and going to use the M2's in other laptops that can benefit from the larger capacity.
Working with M2 drives for the first time has been a learning experience for me. First off, there's different types of M2's and you had better know which you are working with. Not a major problem in this case. But you need different adapters for the different types unless the adapter is made to handle both types. There are also different length cards and some adapter boards can only use the longer M2 size. Even the adapters that can be configured to use the short cards come with standoffs that may be pushed into place or soldered into place. Trying to remove soldered standoffs thinking they were pushed into place (don't ask) rips the pads off the PCB. So be careful the first time using a different supplier the first time.
So now I'm digging around for more 4-8 GB CF cards and going to use the M2's in other laptops that can benefit from the larger capacity.
Working with M2 drives for the first time has been a learning experience for me. First off, there's different types of M2's and you had better know which you are working with. Not a major problem in this case. But you need different adapters for the different types unless the adapter is made to handle both types. There are also different length cards and some adapter boards can only use the longer M2 size. Even the adapters that can be configured to use the short cards come with standoffs that may be pushed into place or soldered into place. Trying to remove soldered standoffs thinking they were pushed into place (don't ask) rips the pads off the PCB. So be careful the first time using a different supplier the first time.
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