[MinnowBoard] Minnowboard Max sata lure homemade

[Karel Mácha]

Hello everyone,

I hope this could me interesting to someone. I wanted to have a second SATA port on my Minnowboard Max. The second SATA - mSATA - is carried out on the high-speed expansion port. So I ordered some samples of the 60-pin header directly from  TE Connectivity. They send me three pieces to Germany in a couple of days - great service, thank you very much. Then I bought a SATA extension cable from Delock - see http://www.delock.de/produkte/G_82855/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en

Then I cut the female part from the extension cable, removed all the pins from the header beside the pins 1-6 , 13 and 14 and soldered the cable to the header. Which was quite tricky, you need soldering iron which where you can set temperature to 250-260 C° and some fine soldering tips. At the end I fixed the cable to the header with two-component adhesive (epoxy resin).

To my big surprise the Minnowboard booted and recognized a SATA hard-disc connected to this adapter. I was able to install Fedora Linux to the disc and boot from it. Now I can use two SATA discs at once.

I put some pictures online here: http://imgur.com/a/2YLry The second picture is not sharp enough, only the B-/B+ SATA lines were soldered at this time.

Well ... I know it is kind of hack what I did, but it works great and the final costs were like 5€ for the SATA extension cable and about an 1 hour of work.

Greetings,

Karel

+ --------------------------
+  Karel Mácha
+  www.karlitos.net
+ --------------------------