Do questions get any harder? p7811fx miniPCIe SSD ?

eltouristo

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OK I will try to stump everyone lol. I have a p7811fx (gateway laptop). It has 2 of what are described as miniPCIe slots. It's unknown to me (despite quite some effort) what exactly they actually are/to the system, and if they are the same. (miniPCIe is often confused, even 'officially' with mSATA). One slot has a WLAN card on it. Answering the question would require knowing the actual specs and capabilities of the slots in the system. The question: Could a miniPCIe SSD be put in that slot, could it be bootable, and if so, would it potentially allow better performance than a 2.5 SSD in one of the SATA II bays? (I'm pretty sure those are SATA II). It would be utterly amazing to me if anyone could actually find this out ! Win my geek kudos! lol
 

A mini PCIe SSD on this model? I don't think that kind of drive existed then - and modern m.2 PCIe drives and mSATA drives are keyed differently than what you're describing; the pins would not match the receptacle.

Often times, the motherboard will have very small text next to certain components to distinguish/label them. Do you see any print near the port that might help? Or does the port show up in the system BIOS as another storage drive port?
 

eltouristo

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Thanks prostar I will try to look for labels. The slot looks like half length or so of a current M.2. Yes I've seen a couple of drives about that (shorter) size labeled as 'miniPCIe' SSD. I can't see about the slotting yet, maybe if I find really good photos or just pop it open and take some. Even if slotting is good, doesn't mean lappy would recognize. And then may be same as SATA II bus. Lots of ways for it to be no go, or no better. Yes it's a mostly academic question, and I should just go with 2.5 SSD. But just because a miniPCIe drive may have not been made as early as the laptop, that does not rule out that the laptop could use it. I'm primarily trying to increase internet browsing. But this is not a connection speed thing. Resource monitor-disk..shows a lot of I/O for Firefox. If an SSD can help that, and that helps browsing, that would be great. If miniPCIe is faster and would help even more, that would be even greater. I also see quite a bit of CPU usage in the monitor. But I wonder if any of that is actually reflective of read/write task bottleneck idk exactly how the monitor works. But I wonder if anyone has done a good test on Hardrive vs SSD for browsing with many multiple tabs open and loaded. (system, connection, tabs, all the same). Does anyone know if the duration of CPU usage can go down if storage speeds go up? Even if maybe magnitude of usage is same, if duration is shorter....well just a weird thought.
 

eltouristo

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I don't think such a statement can be true or false unless we are very specific about exactly what the system is doing. I think we can generalize though, that RAM is seldom or never a bottleneck. And for many tasks I think that even this cpu can be waiting on read/write operations. I think what I'm tryiing to say is mainly that it probably really depends on how processing intensive vs how read/write intensive the activity is. The question is not how old this system cpu and buss tech etc are. It's how storage buss intense is Firefox browing-related activity vs its cpu intensity. I wish FF included some intense optimization choices. I just want it to remember where I went, what tabs I had open, and cookies. This is next to nothing. honestly Idk wtf is so gd important that it has to constantly do all that read/writing and cpu stuff. Some weird tab updating, flash background crap? idk. Drives me nuts lol. i'm sure we could live without it and not be missing much or anything. I'm also sure that just opening 100 tabs doesn;t need to take so much resources, I don't mean loading them, just having them unloaded somehow seem to dramatically increase mem usage. It wish it would treat them like favorites sitting in ram (almost nothing) Higher mem usage seems to be correlated to higher cpu usage in what I'm looking at. Blah blah.,..yeay, sorry, I think my question is actually really a lot about FF optimization : ). But the way I like to have a lot of tabs open is just a problem. I keep tying to deal with temporary favorite list etc, but it's just a pain compared to having whatever I'm working on the last few days as tabs. They are often the same general sites, but specific pages that would create thousands of favorites if I tried to do that. And I havn't found a way to use history to quickly go back to a specific page. History doesn't work, because I close the tabs I'm no longer wanting but in history I can't quickly tell. Maybe there is a management method I haven't figured out. i just want it to show all 'active' tabs but keep them completely unloaded other than a lable. I use a plugin called 'auto unload tabs' but it doesn't really work. Closing FF and the restarting is and restoring session seems to help a LOT.( But it's still much bigger if there are more tabs, even though they are suppose to be totally unloaded). I think it really needs a update to KEEP it in that state! Or is there is already a way to keep it that way, I would really like to know.