So. Since the World is falling apart and the entire supply of 2242 M.2’s appears to have exploded and price and then disappeared. Has anyone happened to stumble across an adapter that can get our Sparks accepting 2280 SSD format? Those drives are starting to drop in price in many cases, and can go up to 8TB.
I don’t care if I have to rip the bottom plate off my GX10s and run a ribbon cable to drive, or make a new housing via 3D print. It really feels like its time to invent and bodge our way out of this ridiculous market and limitation built into these Sparks. Completely ridiculous it doesn’t support more common, less expensive, M.2 formats.
M.2 2242 is indeed a very bad design choice, but I don’t think modding the box is a wise choice, either.
The USB ports are 20 Gbps, so if you need extra storage, maybe consider using external drives or SSD enclosures. Those are easier and safer to use, with better reliability. Sure, ~2 GB/s is not the fastest speed in the world, but it is decent enough in my opinion.
I’m using this in my ASUS (1TB), since I got the DGX with 4TB. I had Claude prep me a script to migrate models between the local and external storage and also map them in FSTAB for huggingface/hub cache to work out from there.
The only thing I don’t use from the external storage is the PLE table for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next as the performance penalty is noticeable, then loading times is ~30 secs longer than internal for a 60GB model, which is totally OK with me.
It’s an absolute shame how limited the IO on the Spark is. That’s its biggest flaw given how easy it would have been to have included proper USB4 with 40 Gbps or 80 Gbps. Limited IO is the main flaw with all mini PCs. At least we have the 200 Gbps networking. It’s much more complicated, but if you’re not maxing out your switch with the Sparks alone, you can hang a NAS on the 200 Gbps network.
Well the ribbon cable should be straightforward, but it’d require running without the case or destructively modifying the case and it would need to run out of the case in the opposite direction that the drive plugs in to. Care would need to be taken not to accidentally cause any shorts on the Spark board. I’m assuming something like this product would work. It seems obvious that it supports multiple host port sizes by cutting the mounting PCB at the marked lines, but it doesn’t seem to say that in the listing. It’d require the ability to cut the PCB.
Someone could go pretty crazy down this route as well, using a cable that terminates in a PCI slot, then putting a bifurcation card into that to split the bandwidth to 2x PCIe4.0 ports. That’d support two Gen4 SSDs or a Gen4 SSD and something else that can run acceptably with PCIe4.0x4 speed.
I am not concerned about modifying the case our housing to solve and expand the drive capabilities here. The 2242 drives are just not available, and the prices are ridiculous enough now, that I will mod these to save thousands.
Yes, the same can be done with the M.2 slot for the WiFi adapter, if WiFi isn’t needed, but that’s probably only PCIe5.0x1. Definitely not x4 like the slot for the SSD. It could be used for some things, but not for a fast SSD.
Since the World is falling apart and the entire supply of 2242 M.2’s appears to have exploded and price and then disappeared…
Amazon is selling a SABRENT Rocket 2242 4TB NVMe drive for $775 with next day delivery. Search using the part number SB-2742-4TB . Very expensive, but it is available.