 You know, I rarely if ever have a chance to get bored because whenever I feel it coming on, all I need to do is fire up a web browser and then descend into what I call a related products black hole until I find something so mind-bendingly weird or stupid that I know that I simply must have one so I can try it out and share it with you guys. And because my websites of choice for these descents are ones like Taobao, AliExpress, Deal Extreme, and eBay, it is usually quite affordable and doesn't take that long. So without further ado, I present to you my latest find, the DDR4 memory to M.2 SSD drive adapter. How does it work? Well, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say probably not the way that you'd expect. But I'm sure what you were expecting was this segue to our sponsor, GlassWire. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code Linus and get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. Okay, so what we've got here, if the product name is anything to go by, is a DDR to M.2 hard disk adapter card, stated at M.2 NGFFB key, memory slot, SSD expansion card. So what I gather from all of that is that we are adapting a DDR4 memory to M.2 hard disk adapter card. What I gather from all of that is that we are adapting a DDR4 memory slot to an M.2 SSD drive slot. So I guess we should probably go get one of each of those things and give this a shot, shall we? Okay, so we've got our test bench, we've got our M.2 SSD, and we've got our bizarre adapter. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull out one of my memory sticks here and actually before we put this in, let's install an SSD on it. So they helpfully include this screwdriver. Put that into the- uh-oh. Oh, we seem to have a slight problem here, Houston. This does not fit in. How about if we try it the other way? Nope. Even though it kind of looks like it'll go in, that still doesn't work. So what could be the problem here? I mean, other than that this is completely insane. All right, so we've missed something here. We did a bit of an explainer on this a while back, but I don't blame me for not watching it. It was kind of boring, but M.2 is just a physical slot and it can actually accept drives that use both the newer NBME protocol and the older SATA type drives. So what we need is a SATA M.2 drive with the correct keying for this type of slot. So now that we're equipped with that, let's try again, shall we? So here's our WD Blue. You can see that. Aha! Indeed, this does install now. Go ahead and grab our screw. Oh, look at that. Our free screwdriver is even- Whoa! It's even magnetic. Not very magnetic, mind you. Just a little magnetic. Okay, so there it is. It feels a little like complete madness and maybe it is, but hey, isn't that why we're all here? Okay. Let's fire it up, shall we? Oh, this is actually my first time using my test bench in the new office. I need to turn on my UPS. I need to plug in my UPS. Hey! There we go. All right. Wait, did I not plug this in? Oh, dang it. All right, you crazy little adapter. Show me your magic. Reveal to me your secrets. Okay, so as we'd expect, we're down to 24 gigs of RAM because we did remove one of our 8 gig sticks. And as far as our storage drives go, we've got a whole lot of nothing going on here. Perhaps then, that's why they included this. I think it was supposed to be red, but it actually ended up kind of pink, didn't it? Ah, SATA cable in the package. So let's shut her down and plug this baby in. Okay, so now that we're just using a SATA cable, we'd expect it to show up as a normal SATA drive, but the thing is there's still nothing. Nada. All right, so here's the thing. There are actually a lot of different ways that an adapter can function. So you know how if you buy a travel adapter for your electronic devices, there are the bulky ones that actually convert from 220 volts to 110 volts versus the simple ones that just physically change the shape of the prongs on your device to fit into another socket? Well, those rely on the user to double check if their device has a universal input switching power supply, kind of like this one. So the same kind of rules apply for computer adapters, and there are a number of different main kinds. The first one is what I call physical adapters, and these are very simple. Actually here, I can grab one right now. This right here is a USB type A to USB micro B adapter cable. And while micro B does actually, this is a fun fact, have an extra conductor in the tip, it's only for sensing if a device that would normally be the target is supposed to act as a host. So this functionality was built for USB on the go or OTG, and allowed you to plug accessories like network cards into devices like phones and tablets. For the vast majority of use cases though, that extra pin lies dormant, and all this cable does is run the same four conductors, power, ground, and then two data wires to two different shaped plugs. No modifications to the signal whatsoever are actually taking place. The second main kind of adapter is a little bit more complicated. I'm going to call these signal mode adapters, for lack of a better term. These take some connector and convert it into another one that is totally different, but natively supported. These types of adapters tend to be relatively inexpensive still, thanks to the fact that the processing is being done on the computer or the device side. The last main adapter I'm going to talk about is what I will call a complete adapter. These take an entirely unrelated signal, and then actively convert it to something else in real time. An example of this would be something like an HDMI to VGA adapter. HDMI has no legacy analog mode of operation, and a VGA display device has zero understanding whatsoever of digital signaling. So these types of adapters tend to be more expensive due to the required processing power, like there will be chips inside, they tend to be bulkier for the same reason, and they also tend to be directional, only working one way. So this one will take the HDMI port on your laptop and convert it to a VGA cable for that projector in the old conference room, but it would not go the other way around. It's also common for these to require an external power source in order to function, depending on what type of connection is being converted and whether it has power pins that can be utilized. So, back to the topic at hand then. This device was far less interesting than I had initially hoped right after I clicked on it. The geek in me would have absolutely loved to see some kind of, you know, crazy way to use a high speed memory interface with a standard SSD. The issue is that such a product would have to have been designed from the ground up for that type of access, like Intel's Optane DIMMs that they actually, I think, just finally started releasing, because a normal computer would have no idea what to do with a storage device plugged into a memory slot. The interfaces are absolutely nothing alike. Once I accepted that my pipe dream wasn't happening, I decided I would still be pretty happy with having my drive powered by the memory slot with only a SATA data cable required in order to get it working. Which is to say that I was pretty disappointed when I figured out what was actually going on here, and I kind of wondered why they bothered to mount this thing on a DIMM at all, because if you look closely near the pins here, you'll actually see that none of them are connected to any traces on the printed circuit board, which means that we're pretty much just wasting the gold plating on these connectors, and we could have just as easily double taped this thing to the side of another component or left it hanging off of the cables, making this, I would say, somewhere in between a Type 1 and Type 2 adapter, because we're pretty much just taking these pins and converting them, it looks like we're doing a little bit of something to it, to these pins over here. The good news is that once it's all hooked up correctly, our drive does indeed show up. Here's our 500 gig drive, and we can probably even boot to it, so M.2 SATA, folks. There it is. I'm just a little disappointed, because I had hoped there was a little bit more exotic technology going on, and this is pretty much just a simple physical adapter. Well. Our sponsor for today's video is Massdrop, featuring the Massdrop X Beyerdynamic DT177X Go headphones. So Beyerdynamic, if you're not familiar with them, is a world-renowned German manufacturer, and these ones feature a closed-back design, their latest generation of 45mm Tesla drivers, a wide frequency range, and weighty controlled bass. They're a favorite for recording studios, and their 32-ohm impedance mean that they're easy to drive from portable sources without an amp. They feature a durable design with aluminum ear cups, a spring steel headband, and metal yokes and hinges, and you can click the link below and reserve your set today. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you know what to do. 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