Episode: 3527
Title: HPR3527: My gEeeky Experiment - Part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3527/hpr3527.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:59:25

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This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3527 for Tuesday 8th of February 2022.
Today's show is entitled, My Geelyacure Experiment Part 3, It is hosted by Claudio Miranda,
and is about 14 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Claudio talks about how he upgraded the SSD on his ASUS CPC 901 network.
Hello Haka Public Radio, this is Claudio Miranda, wishing you a happy new year on this first
recording of mine for 2022, and my third in this series, My Geelyac Experiment, where I
talked about how I did stuff to my ASUS EPC 901 network.
If you want to catch Part 1, that would be Episode 3383, and Part 2 is Episode 3418.
Now, there are a bunch of links that go with this episode, but I've gone ahead and just
linked to my blog post about this, which has all the necessary links there, so that way I don't
fill up the show notes too much. Everything is just one location, so just check out the blog post
for more details on everything. So, this one I'm going to talk about how I upgraded the SSD
on the 901. Now, this particular network has the 4GB plus 16GB configuration, where the primary SSD
is 4GB, and the secondary is the more accessible 16GB, which is under the network itself,
and if you just remove the cover there, you should be able to get to it easily.
So, I've been running OpenBSD current on this, and at the time, I decided to update to a
newer snapshot of OpenBSD current, so I went through the process, restarted, and after
it had completed the upgrade, and restarted again, I noticed that the system was complaining
that the root partition was full, which I thought was rather odd, though not too odd,
because I did kind of, I was kind of close to the edge there, so I had to remove some software,
but this was just ridiculous, because I hadn't installed anything else.
So, after it had finished restarting, I decided to do a DF-H on the root partition,
which is where I had the, the root partition was on the 4GB SSD, and my home was on the 16GB.
I noticed that it complained that I was completely out of space,
but in such a way that I was actually, I was actually missing space from the SSD,
it actually was saying that, it was saying that I only had 3.6GB of space,
and that I was over capacity at 103%. So, the only way that this could be possible
is that the 4GB SSD was starting to fail, so it was either replaced, put everything on the 16GB,
and just completely ignore the 4GB partition, but then I'd have even less space than I had before.
So, this is when I said to myself, I'm going to have to see what upgrade options there are
for this netbook, because 16GB is just not going to be enough.
So, I started going on the net, I looked in Amazon, a few other places, eBay,
to see if I could find something that was compatible with this, and the only ones that I saw were
at about 64GB at most, and they were way too expensive. So, I was like, no, there's got to be
something else out there, and so, I started searching again for SSDs that would be compatible with
the EPC 901, and I did come across a bunch of them, which at first was great, but then when
I started looking at them, they said that it was compatible with the 901, a few other netbooks,
but that was, I was a little suspicious, it just seems, when something seems too good to be
true usually as well, that was the case here. So, I decided to go ahead and do some research,
and doing that, I actually came across some very useful information.
In the blog post that I'll be putting the show notes, I linked to another blog where this person
was trying to do the exact same thing, and he went ahead and he ordered an M-SATA drive, an M-SATA
SSD for his netbook, and it seemed to fit just fine, everything, he went ahead, was able to install it,
however, in the comment section, he does know that the netbook did not detect it, and would not
boot from it. Fortunately, another person replied to his comment stating that the M-SATA SSDs that
you see online, they may be advertised to work, but they won't work. The thing is that the connector
on the EPC 901 is a mini PCIe connector slot, and it has to take a mini PCIe drive.
The connectors, if you look at them on an M-SATA SSD and a mini PCIe one, they look the same,
they have the same number of pins and everything, but the problem is that they're wired differently,
so that's what that one person who replied to the author had stated, so he recommended getting
an M-M mini PCIe to M-SATA adapter. One other thing that I came to realize is that
it's not a SATA interface at all, it's actually a parallel ATA interface, it's some weird
custom thing that ASUS did with these netbooks, so I said okay, thankfully I didn't purchase anything,
now that I have this information I can go ahead and do some searching, so I went ahead and I
looked at Amazon with a few other places, and I finally went with a 3x5 cm SATA adapter,
to 3x7 cm mini PCIe SATA SSD for ASUS, it was the adapter for an M-SATA card, M-SATA SSD,
cost me about $7 US, and then I purchased an M-SATA, it's advertised as an M-SATA mini PCIe 120GB,
128GB SSD, so you gotta be careful with some of these vendors, so yeah, I went ahead and I bought
this, had good reviews, cost me $25 US, so in total I spent a little over 30 bucks,
so not too bad, not too bad, to upgrade from the 16GB secondary to the 120GB on this netbook,
so I ordered this, and when it arrives I went ahead and I cracked open my SSD, my SSD,
my EPC netbook, and I went ahead and I installed the M-SATA drive on the adapter, and the adapter
onto the mini PCIe slot on the E, closed everything up, crossed my fingers, and turned it on,
lo and behold, the ASUS EPC detected the drive with the adapter, the only thing, the only
weird thing was that, because that accessible slot under the netbook is the secondary,
it's gonna be detected as the secondary, so what happens is when you turn it on, it complains
that there's no primary because this, what I notice is that with this adapter, it actually
disables the primary drive, so you have to hit F1 in order to boot from the secondary,
I searched online to see if there was some sort of BIOS update or something that would bypass that,
but there is none, so it's just a matter of hitting F1 when the netbook posts, but aside from that,
it actually boots from it, I was able to install a snapshot of OpenBSD on it,
and yeah, I backed up all my files before doing anything, before replacing everything,
and then once the system was installed, I just created, I believe I created just one large partition
on the SSD, I don't remember if I split it, regardless, I had the entire operating system plus
my home directory on that new SSD, I was trying to see if there was a way to maybe trick it,
but yeah, I just have to deal with the F1. Anyway, so I did that, and I didn't notice
quite a speed boost, I mean, for what it is, I noticed quite a speed boost compared to the original
SSD, that's because the original SSD's right speed is very, very slow compared to this one,
and this is a cheap Chinese branded SSD, but was more than sufficient for what I was going to do
with this, and so far it's been working fine. I did decide to open up the netbook to find out
if maybe I could go ahead and install the SSD onto the primary slot to avoid the F1,
but what I did come to, I did come to realize something, the internal SSD that they would just say
is internal for the primary, I assumed was soldered, apparently it's not, it is on a slot, so you
can remove it, but the problem is that it is a half height SSD, so the one that I purchased would
not fit, the only thing I'd probably have to do, and I did search on Amazon and eBay for this,
is get an extender cable and try and fish that all the way to the other side, but at this point,
it's not something that I may invest money on to get done. For now, hitting F1 at post is fine,
it's something I've been just doing every time at this point, but otherwise it's been working great
with this adapter, and the speed has improved quite a bit on this to the point where I can actually
run Chromium on this netbook while SSDH to wherever in a terminal, and I have two tabs in Chromium,
and it's pretty usable, it's more usable than it was previously, but it's pretty quickly for what
it is, and I have to say I'm very happy with it. Other than that, that was the significant upgrade
that I did to my little netbook, and it's just trucking along still so far, so yeah, if you have an
ASUS EPC sitting around, and yeah, you think it's maybe a little too slow, see if you can update
the drive on it. I know there are other models of netbooks that use the standard hard drives,
so those should be easy to upgrade, just a matter of getting a SATA SSD or something, and
makes the world a difference. So yeah, that's pretty much it for this episode, not much to detail
other than that. I hope you enjoyed it, I hope I didn't ramble too much. I know I have a tendency
to do that, and I will say that in every episode, but yeah, I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to
get in contact with me if you're on the Fediverse, I am now on the BSD.network instance,
that is my main account there, so look for ClaudioM at BSD.network. My account, my old account,
ClaudioM at mastadon.sdf.org is still there, but that's just an alternate account now. So if you
want to reach me on the Fediverse, that's the place to be. As far as email, the email I was giving out
previously apparently is going away, thank you Google for doing away with the free Google workspace,
so the ClaudioAtlinXpacement.com is going away at some point. So if you want to reach me,
you can reach me there, you can also find me on IRC, on ourcastplanet on the libera.chat network,
and yeah, be sure to comment in the comment section of this episode. Anyway, hope you all have a
wonderful year, have a wonderful day, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.
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