Other uses for a WiFi slot in a laptop

[clm1919]

Has anyone had any success with using the A/E key (?) type wifi slot in a laptop for ANYTHING other than a wifi card?

I've seen some video's and read some websites - just curious if any has any experience with adding an M.2 storage device or one of those cards that give SATA slots or USB headers - even more SD-card slots.

Sadly in my machines space is very limited, but I'm was just wondering if anyone has found success in this area.

Laptop that prompted the question - Acer Chromebook R11

other_uses_for_wifi_slot.webp (394.51 KiB) Viewed 201 times

[wizard]

@clm1919

Read through this post by user @mouldy , he's our expert on that.
viewtopic.php?t=11112&hilit=chromebook

wizard

[mouldy]

It works on most of modern laptops. You do need to use an adapter and usually the shortest NVMe. If you can wait on the slow boat from China you can get the adapters as cheap as $3 each. Double to triple that from American reseller usually. The biggest thing is to make sure there is room. Sometimes they place the wifi slot where there is barely room for wifi card let alone an adapter and NVMe. There are some more expensive adapters using two parts connected with a ribbon cable. They give you lot more options where to place the NVMe. This does work like say on many modern laptops, cloudbooks and chromebooks. If you go on youtube, most seem to be about doing this to an HP Stream. But its the same whatever brand, model. Mostly just worth doing with low end machines that have soldered eMMC drive and no slot for storage expansion. So great to be able to put like a 500GB NVMe into some chromebook or netbook with like 16GB or 32GB eMMC. Not that expensive either.

EDIT: Might add, some bioses will see the NVMe, some wont. If they wont then you will need to use refind to boot. It has a driver for the NVMe. Refind will need to be on a bootable drive. The eMMC drive is fine. I believe @wizard has a thread on doing this. There are some videos on youtube. The older HP Streams needed refind to boot. Some of newer ones had support in the bios. Oh and on chromebook conversions, the Mr.Chromebox UEFI bios does support NVMe natively.