MP 1,1-5,1 Airport slot for m.2 SSD?

[lukesturr]

I did a quick search here and couldn't find anyone that has tried this with their 5,1 Mac Pro. Do y'all think buying a mini PCIe to m.2 adapter and a NVMe SSD and installing it in the airport card would work? Even if it does work, space may be a limiting factor due to the location of the slot in the Mac Pro, but this extended mini PCIe to m.2 adapter could be a solution.

I know the speed of the mini PCIe socket is limited to x1 speeds and the standard PCIe slots make much more sense, but it'd be interesting just to know if it works.

 

[tsialex]

I did a quick search here and couldn't find anyone that has tried this with their 5,1 Mac Pro. Do y'all think buying a mini PCIe to m.2 adapter and a NVMe SSD and installing it in the airport card would work? Even if it does work, space may be a limiting factor due to the location of the slot in the Mac Pro, but this extended mini PCIe to m.2 adapter could be a solution.

I know the speed of the mini PCIe socket is limited to x1 speeds and the standard PCIe slots make much more sense, but it'd be interesting just to know if it works.

It's not a good idea since AirPort mini-PCIe slot is connected to the southbridge and not directly to the PCIe.

If you connect a M.2 SSD there, you will make anything else directly connected to the southbridge, like SATA/Ethernet/FireWire/USB/SMC/SMI/LPC, starve bandwidth.

Anyway, even if everything else won't starve, it's just ~250MB/s since it's PCIe v1.0 x1 connection.

 

[lukesturr]

Anyway, even if everything else won't starve, it's just ~250MB/s since it's PCIe v1.0 x1 connection.

Wow didn't know it was PCIe v1. Yeah, I agree that'd be bad.

Your post reminded me of the Block Diagram in the Service Manual. The x4 ESI/DMI connection to the southbridge is 1.25 GB/s so I can see how utilizing the full bandwidth of the "airport" slot could limit bandwidth for other devices.

Thanks