For those with slow 1.8" PATA drives wanting SATA...

The way I measured my was to use powertop in a Linux recovery console. Find a baseline power consumption with the ZIF HDD connected at idle and under load (dd if=/dev/sda of=tempfile bs=64k). Do the same with the ZIF SSDs connected. Can then use the ZIF HDD's idle power and load power consumption specification to calculate usage. Know too that under load the I/O chipset will add to power consumption.

Can also pull the ZIF SSD from the system altogether to know what the system idle power consumption is.

The relative testing needs to be done within a relatively short timeframe as instantenous power consumption differs across battery capacity points.

Using a wattmeter would be more accurate, such as kill-a-watt, but would cost more and be more tedious to setup.

 

Completed the wiring today and took some pictures.
Yes it fits in the UX! and yes it does not perform as hoped.
After the hdparm and bar edit procedure it had good speeds only for one testrun, the second run showed slow seq.writes again.
Connecting it to the testrig showed the good values again, so it's not the plumming.
Mmm, what to do? Suggestions anyone?

 

Well, you could change to a different UX...
Yep, no problems anymore, consistent results.
Seq. read/write 83/56, 4K blocks 14/6.

 

UXmania has done it.. again. Just 2 months shy of 2 years since this thread was created UXmania has shown a workable DIY microsata-to-ZIF adapter solution. Others may wish to leave the microsata connector on, instead soldering to the accessible tracks like shown here. Adding an on/off power slider to enable power to the ZIF adapter would be desirable then as well. Then the microsata SSD could easily still be used as a native sata device.

The great news is this opens the door to using other 1.8" microsata solutions like X18M G2, SF1222, C300 from http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...1361-1-8-sata-ssds-available.html#post6978065 . Just need to deshell the 1.8" sata SSD and solder in the US$15 microsata-to-ZIF adapter . Or if don't want to solder could ask a local mobile phone technical to do it for you.

Well done UXmania for pioneering the way

EDIT: NOTE - DIY adapter has a Jmicron JM20330 sata-to-pata controller which was found to cause problems with standby/resume and cannot transmit TRIM commands here.

 

Connected a wattmeter, from a batterycharger, into the powercable that leads to the drive in the testrig.
Powerconsumption from the ssd+adapter is equal to the Mtron Mobi 3000 that was in my UX before.

Thanks everyone for the help and advice!

 

Nice Job, I accidentally purchased a Intel X-18 SATA (microSATA) for a DELL XT that currently has a mechanical 1.8 inch ZIF PATA HD

This looks like the solution that could help me out! I have been looking and called every single adaptor provider in the last 4 months with no possibility, until now it seems...

I am a bit worried about the soldering portion, what gets soldered to what.

Can someone provide link or instructions on how soldering connectors should be?

Anyone have the same issue with a DELL XT Laptop? Thanks for any help.

Also, UXMania, has the performance of the DIY been up to standard ?

 

You don't need to worry about the soldering, just 6 wires need connecting. Two for power and four for the data.
Pictures are provided in post #102 and it's straight forward.
Google on Intel X-18m and you will find the drive specs, etc.
ftp://download.intel.com/design/flash/NAND/mainstream/mainstream-sata-ssd-datasheet.pdf

But before you start you'd better have a good look at the space available. How much room do you have to work with. For the Sony UX i had to remove the sataconnector and shorten the pcb. This means there is no way back!
How thick will the satadrive be without the casing and the sataconnector? The Samsung Thin is 3mm. The sata2zif adapter used by me, after modifying, is 5.4mm.

The speeds are really good, i feel the UX pata is where the bottleneck is.

 

awesome, i'm very tempted to try this out.. we'll see...

(i have two zif laptops and at least one spare 1.8" sata ssd around..)

 

well, ordered one Mach Xtreme Technology Nano ZIF Series 1,8 Zoll PATA SSD - 120GB for one of the notebooks instead, got a nice price (214usd). i'll report back if it works as expected. should give that craptop of him a good life for the first time (it's still a core 2 duo 1.06ghz with 2gb ram, so it'll be slow. but compared to the 80gb 4200rpm disk that's in right now, it'll be an amazing boost in both storage and speed).

 

if space is an issue, one could use one of the new intel ssds in mSATA format together with the adapter, like here (or from other manufacturers of course):

Intel's SSD 310: G2 Performance in an mSATA Form Factor - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News