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mSata to mini PCIe MOD? (possible to have airport with a mini PCIe BroadCom card?)

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Joined
Jan 13, 2011
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35
Motherboard
z77-ds3h
CPU
i5 - 3330
Graphics
intel hd2000
Mac
  1. iMac
Hi all,
It's been almost a year since i bought my Z77-DS3h Mobo from Gigabyte and today i was looking for something on the mobo and i saw a mSATA slot that looks exactly like miniPCIe slot.
I start looking around if it is possible to hook a BCM etc mini PCIe card to this slot and i came up to this :
http://hackaday.com/2010/12/18/making-msata-work-with-mini-pci-express/
here is the image :
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/580/msatavsmpcie.jpg/

So if you mod the mini PCIe it will be possible to boot the system with a wifi card in this slot and recognised as airport?
Anyone tried?
I currently run my BCM (4311 i think) mini PCIe as airport with a PCIe to PCIx adapter but for some reason it is very slow (not strong signal) and i suspect that is the cheap ebay adapter.
I have the same BCM card on the laptop and it is strong, also has a/b/g.
On mountain lion it shows only b/g and less channels.

Any thoughts?
 
Here is a comparative pinout:

http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSwebsite/images/pin/intel mSATA pin.bmp

As you can see, the mini PCIe standard pinout and the mSATA pinout overlap to an extent and it is sort of up to the manufacturer if they fully wire up a slot configured for mSATA so as to also include the functions of the mini PCIe cards.

It will not harm the board for you to simply pop an airport card into the mSATA slot and see if it recognises it. If it does not recognise it, then more than likely the mSATA slot has not been fully wired for anything other than mSATA. If it does recognise it then you are good to go.
 
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