Acer Aspire One AO722-0473 SSD Mod

Hello. I recently purchased the AO722, and the first thing I did was upgrade the RAM. While doing so, I noticed an extra mPCIE slot available. This gave me the idea to seize the opportunity to use said extra slot to install a small SSD for the OS, and improve my speed even more.

I quickly purchased a 32gb mini PCI Express SSD from ebay, and flawlessly installed it into the slot. To my dismay, it was not recognized by the laptop AT ALL. I dual boot to windows and ubuntu, and neither OS recognized the SSD. I then checked the BIOS, which also failed to recognize the device.

In an attempt to diagnose the problem, I removed the internal wireless card from the primary mPCIE slot, and placed the SSD into it. This caused the laptop to fail to POST, though the wireless light came on which, tangentially, caused me to think that the primary mPCIE slot is hardwired for the wireless card. This has left me in a bind, and apparently no one else has thought of installing an SSD into the extra slot of this laptop, because my google searches have been fairly fruitless.

I have seen that apparently some other Asper models have no power wired to their extra mPCIE slots, is that possibly the case with the AO722? Or did I just get a bad SSD?

Thank you in advance for any help.

 

I am having the exact same problem. I read through the documentation for the product and it literally says nothing about the slot (unless I missed it). I am currently contacting Acer support and am supposed to get an answer to the question in 24 hours or less.

I'll try to post what I hear on here. Let me know if you find out anything. I suspect the slot in the netbook is just mPCIe, not mSATA - but they really should be including this in the documentation or at least in the specs instead of making it hard to find.

 

This may or may not help, but when installing 3G cards, we have to put a little bit of tape over Pin 20 of the card to enable the card. Maybe the same with the SSD?

 

I am disheartened to hear this. I just purchased this model on Amazon along with a crucial M4 ssd. I read that this drive works in this model. Here is the url I read it at:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3VSE2GEPT ... hisHelpful

I hope this helps you out. Best of luck and please update this thread with any changes.

Cheers,
J

 

I don't think you have anything to worry about with your M4 ssd. A regular SSD should be able to be slotted in as a hard-drive replacement.
It would be a neat trick if someone does manage to get the mini pcie slot working as a primary boot option so we could have both a little/cheap ssd and a larger hard-drive.

 

Hi guys, I've just registered...

So for the problem, im looking towards buying something like this http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/mydigi ... msata-ssd/
but as I see, you didn't manage to make the mini-pcie mSata working.

I can see one possible solution, if you can try it: flash the unlocked bios http://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-U ... ck-request
it's safe (for my 722-c6ckk worked alright) and it has literally tons of settings for slots, ie pcie and sata, so you could try making it work with some settings from the bios.

Please let me know if you are sucessful, or unsucessful, so I can buy that SSD, or wait for the prices of normal 2.5" SSDs to drop (because I'm a student I don't have a lot of money...)

Thank you!

 

:roll:
I am definitely not experimenting with some unknown bios and potentially bricking my machine.
Save up and get a regular ssd, they work very well in this little netbook.

 

@m4te & @n1tr0....

Hi did either of you manage to get this working at all? Very few hits from google for this and most of substance link by to this forum so this is my last hope

 

I just installed a regular patriot sata3 ssd. It hauls along pretty good. It took less than a minute to install, combined w/ 4gb of ram, it's a pretty quick little netbook for non-computation heavy applications.

 

I didn't even try, but from the experiences of other people, I would say it doesn't work. Also, prices of regular 2.5 SSDs dropped, so I would stick with it.

 

I installed a 500GB 2.5 inch sata hard drive in my AOA110 (aka: ZG5)
Considering the price per MB of an ssd, I don't see the point.