[PLUG-TALK] ThinkPad SD slot

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Mar 2 23:42:09 UTC 2022


On Wed, 2 Mar 2022, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> Yes, you certainly can use an SD card as additional storage. Linux will
> see it as another drive, which you can partition and format as you see fit
> - much the same as a USB drive. However, there are a few caveats:

John,

How intersting! The web sites I read suggested that SDs (adults and minis)
are limited to 2GB, the SDHC (high capacity) to 32GB, and so on.

> 3) The marketplace is overflowing with SD cards that were manufactured as
> 32GB cards and have been hacked to appear as 1TB cards (32 squared =
> 1024). Unfortunately, eBay, Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, and others offer the
> hacked cards with no way for the customer to tell. And the picture and
> description indicate a name brand like Kingston, SanDisk, etc. The only
> way to tell is the price - a '1TB Kingston' card at a price of $24.99 is
> almost surely a fraud.

As Alan pointed out, Bunny Huang's book has information on telling real from
fake, but I've not yet read to chapter 5.

> I've been shopping for a 1TB card for the same reason as you - my new
> laptop came with a 256GB M.2 drive, and it has an SD card slot, but only
> two USB ports, and one is for power. I haven't bought one yet, and part of
> the reason is not being sure of what I am getting. But I should add that
> USB drives are also commonly hacked these days. I haven't seen any M.2
> drives of questionable size compared to the price, but I expect that they
> will appear any day now.

M.2 slots are specific to the bus they use to transfer data. If the card has
two notches (B+M) the SATA bus is used; if it has only one notch (M) then
the NVMe protocol in the PCIe bus is used. They ain't interchangable.

While the memory on the X1/gen6 is soldered to be main board and cannot be
increased the storage can be increased. Based on your experience as written
above I'll probably buy a replacement M.2 card rather than futz with finding
a real high capacity full-size SDHC or SDUC chip.

Thanks much,

Rich



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