Innodisk makes ddr3 adapter for M.2 SSDs

Innodisk, a manufacturer of memory and storage products, especially for the embedded market, had a striking piece of hardware in its booth at Computex. The company showed an adapter for SSDs to plug into a RAM slot.

Using a solid state drive as working memory would of course result in painfully slow ram, reason to ask Innodisk for clarification. It turns out that their M.2 adapter only uses the power lines of a ddr3 slot to power the drives. The M.2 SSDs are then ‘just’ connected to the system via a SATA connector. So the drives do not use PCI Express lanes.

To boost the speed, there are not one, but two M.2 SSDs on the adapter. Those two drives are set up in a raid, with a JMicron raid controller controlling the two SSDs. In this way, M.2 SSDs can still be used on systems without an M.2 slot.