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My laptop has two M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slots, but I've only got an HDD with a SATA III connector.

Question(s): How do I connect the two? Does a cable exist which connects an PCIe slot to a Sata III disk?

Slots:

  • "M.2 2242 SSD PCIe NVMe, PCIe 3.0 x4"
  • "M.2 2280 SSD PCIe NVMe, PCIe 3.0 x4"

HDD with a standard, regular SATA III connector. First slot already has an SSD in it. It's about getting a disk for the other one. I tried looking this up on the usual sale sites, but that results in answers about cards for desktops, not anything about laptops.

Now, since Superuser-site culture implicitly demands that all have to explicitly state they are not asking about brand preferences or whatever preferences:

No, I'm NOT asking to compare PCIe versus SATA, nor for any brand comparison. I wanna know if it's possible to use such a disk in such a slot, and, if yes, is a cable, an adapter or another solution.

Thanks. PS Caveat: To my knowledge, not any of the terms I've used above, are brand names, or, if they are, they are so generic, like Aspirin (tm), they can't be seen as brand names.

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  • If the specification state that it supports only PCIe/NVMe drive, then no, you can't, and there's no adapter for such case AFAIK since you need a SATA/AHCI controller for them. (Besides in the case of a laptop it's physically impossible for a extra adapter to fit, not even if the drives are M.2 SATA.) The only chance you might have in addition to a USB adapter/enclosure is a slot for SATA optical drive.
    – Tom Yan
    Commented Dec 23, 2021 at 4:04
  • You would have to find a way to use a cable that sticks out of the laptop case, in order to have the appropriate daughter board, to do the conversion of PCIe to SATA, let alone find a way to power the darn thing.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Dec 23, 2021 at 4:27
  • I found scan.co.uk/products/… but I strongly suspect it is a dumb adaptor and requires your M.2 slot to actually support SATA as well as NVMe which it sounds like yours does not. I cannot find a true SATA to NVMe adaptor, possibly because NVMe doesn't support the full set of disk commands that SATA does.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Dec 23, 2021 at 9:32
  • Even IF you found an adapter, how are you going to get the drive into the laptop ? There wont be room for it ! If you still want to use the sata ssd, get a simple sata to usb converter instead.
    – Silbee
    Commented Dec 23, 2021 at 11:51
  • @Silbee Thanks for reacting. You are, três drôle! There (kind of obvious) is, tóó already room for the drive. But please tell me more about this simple sata to usb connector.
    – GwenKillerby
    Commented Dec 23, 2021 at 14:18

2 Answers 2

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I think something like this should work:

enter image description here

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  • Can you provide a link?
    – Minh Nghĩa
    Commented Dec 7, 2023 at 5:38
  • 2
    You see the chipset in the image that does the conversion between PCIe and SATA? Just search on the internet for JMB585 NVMe or ASM1166 NVMe.
    – Davor Josipovic
    Commented Dec 7, 2023 at 13:35
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Does a cable exist which connects an PCIe slot to a Sata III disk?

Not really.

M.2 Slots are intended for M.2 drives. Some slots may only support PCIe drives, others may support both PCIe and SATA.

If the slot supports SATA then there exist simple wiring adapters to break it out to a SATA connector.

http://www.akasa.co.uk/search.php?seed=AK-PCCMSA-02

If it doesn't support SATA then you would need something with an actual drive controller chip on it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adapter-SATA3-0-Expansion-Drive-Free-Cluster/dp/B0BVR1T53R

(links are to show examples of what exists and do not imply endorsement of particular products or suppliers).

And if what you had was a desktop motherboard with M.2 slots, or an embedded board you were going to mount in a custom chassis those might be reasonable solutions.

But neither of those is suitable for use in a laptop for a few reasons.

  1. There is unlikely to be room to connect the SATA cable to the adapter and still put the lid on the laptop. There may be similar problems at the drive end.
  2. The drive needs power as well as DATA. The adapters in question don't provide that.

There (kind of obvious) is, tóó already room for the drive.

It would be very weird for a laptop manufacturer to supply a space for a 2.5 inch HDD/SSD and yet not provide a way to connect it up.

I strongly suspect that if your laptop has space for a 2.5 inch drive it also has a connector on the motherboard to supply power/data to that drive. However I'm pretty sure the cables are specific to each individual laptop vendor. So you will have to find the service manual for your laptop to identify the correct part.

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  • HP has several models of zBook that have internal space for a 2.5" drive, but can't actually use one. (No bracket to mount it, no SATA and power connectors.) That is because these models use the same housing as the earlier models that had a 2.5" drive. In the newer models some can fit a 3rd and 4th NVMe stick in that space, but even on those it is mostly empty room. So having the space doesn't necessarily mean that you can actually stick such a drive in and have it work.
    – Tonny
    Commented Jan 26 at 12:37

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