Using an SD Card as a Hard Drive in Tight Spaces

Overview

When you’re working with tiny thin clients like the Dell FX170 that come with cramped 4GB disk-on-module storage, traditional hard drive or SSD upgrades won’t fit. In this video, I show you an elegant solution: using an SD card to IDE adapter with a 128GB SD card. This affordable upgrade (around $45 total) gives you 32x more storage in a package that fits perfectly in the tightest of spaces.

Key Moments

• Examining the stock 4GB disk-on-module with female IDE connector
• The challenge: extremely limited space in the Dell FX170 thin client
• Solution: SD card to IDE adapter with IDE cable and 128GB SD card
• Creative “sandwich” technique with twisted cable to fit the cavity
• Connection troubleshooting (the reality of working while filming)
• Success: 128GB detected in BIOS, ready for Windows XP installation

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hello everybody, in this video I’m going to show you how I upgrade these little thin clients. They normally come with these small 4GB or 1GB SSDs. They are little disk-on-modules, so you can see here this has an IDE connector. It’s the same IDE connector that you would find on a laptop hard drive, except this is a female as you can see here, and the male connector’s on the board.

Like I mentioned, this is only 4GB in size. So that’s very limited. It’s usable but it’s very limited. If you install Windows XP, you’re going to be left over with very little space. So I’m going to show you in this video what adapters I use to actually upgrade this.

All right, so the adapters that I use are this little SD card adapter to IDE with an IDE cable, and obviously the SD card. In this case it’s 128GB. And what I end up doing is, as you can see here, let me open this up. I’ve already taken the screws off. As you can see here, there’s not a lot of space to work with. If I get close here, there’s only that little cavity right there to work with. And the space is from here to here, and this is the connector that I have to work with.

What I ended up doing was making a little sandwich like this with the SD card reader, the cable, and then I twisted the cable like that. You see if I can get a good angle right here. Okay, so you can see here it’s kind of twisted, and then I install that in that little area.

All right, so let me do that really quick and then show you the final result.

Now as you can see here, it’s nicely sandwiched in there. It’s about the same height as the heat sink, so the top cover will close. It’s a nice little upgrade from 4 gigs to 128 gigs just by doing that.

What I’m going to do now is I’m going to close this up, plug in the monitor here, and I’ll show you that it’s being detected.

Okay, so as you can see here, it’s nicely sandwiched in there. It’s in there. You can barely see the difference. And the computer’s up and running. Let me go into the BIOS here. And if I go to the standard CMOS… that was a failure. All right, I probably didn’t connect it correctly. Let me try that again.

Okay, second time a charm. I just opened it up and the thing was not properly connected, so turn it back on. Essentially I had connected it one off - the line was not right. Oh, and now I didn’t do the power. Oh my God, this video… you know, I’m going to upload it like this because it just shows what really happens when you work on these computers. It’s not all perfection, especially if you’re recording while you do it because you’re not paying 100% attention.

So now that power is connected, and the reason I label this “12 volt” by the way is because I once plugged in a 19 volt one into something else that blew up. So now I label things. I’m going to power this on and there should be something popping up here.

Ah, perfect! Press F2 for setup. And now I should be able to see the SD to compact flash adapter, 127GB. It’s really 128 but it rounds down or something. And I should be able to install Windows XP on this.

So I’m going to go ahead and install Windows XP and go on from there. So yeah, that’s one quick way that you can use these little adapters to upgrade the hard drive on these little thin clients if you’re really, really tight on space.

So you’ll need the little IDE cable, the SD card adapter, and an SD card. I think this is only like a few bucks, this is $10 bucks, and this is around $20 bucks or less, like $15 or $14 depending on what brand you get. So not a lot of money and then you can get a 128 gigabyte SD card as a hard drive for this little guy.

All right, let me know in the comments what you think. You know, I thank you for watching. If you like this kind of stuff, subscribe and share the video, or just comment down below and please hit the like button. You know, I’m trying to see if people find this interesting or not. All right, thank you.