I just bought a used/refurb Lenovo P340 mini tower PC.
It has an expansion socket that ought to hold a 2280-size M.2 NVMe SSD.
I bought a 2TB one, opened the cover of the PC case, found the available slot for it (see the first photo below), but then had a total WTF moment.
The socket is circled near the top of the photo. It is set up so that the SSD hangs over the outside of the motherboard (really? Yeah, really).
Attached FileTo the right of it is the primary SSD - it has a heat sink, and it looks like it has some sort of black plastic doohicky at the bottom to support the unsupported end of the stick (and presumably is set up to accept a screw to fasten it down. See the circled area toward the bottom of this photo:
Attached FileI've probed around the inside of the PC, but as far as I can tell they have not supplied another one of those black plastic doohicky things for supporting an added-on SSD stick. (Is there a better name for those black plastic doohicky things? Are they standardized, or are they likely to be some unobtainable Lenovo part number that is different depending on not only the model number but probably also the engineering release level of the PC chassis?)
I can't just hang the new stick off of the socket and leave it unsupported, because that would likely fail in the blink of an eye.
But here it is, temporarily hanging from the socket. No, I'm not going to leave it hanging there, rather I'm going to remove it for now.
Attached FileAlso - do I really need to put a heat sink on it? It was certainly nice of Lenovo to strategically place a bundle of power supply wires in just the right spot to make it difficult to install that SSD. I'm not even sure that I could squeeze a heat sink into that space if I tried, unless I somehow reroute the ps wires.
Should I just punt - and get a PCIe to M.2 NVMe converter board and give up on hanging the SSD off the side of the motherboard? It looks like those PCIe converter cards typically come with a heat sink, so I'd be killing two birbs with one card - and, at least for the moment, I have nothing planned to occupy any of the PCIe slots (but I suppose that could change in the future).
Help me, Obi-Wan Kanobi...