I love adapters. Even the goofy ones. There’s just something about turning a “kinda useless” slot or an underpowered box into something genuinely more capable that really tickles that tinkering part of my brain. In this video I dug through a handful of weird adapters I’ve come across lately and tested whether they’re actually useful, or just chaos in a bag. I start with an M.2 E-key to microSD adapter, which is about as compact as it gets for adding storage in space-constrained mini PCs and SBCs. The catch is it’s USB 2.0 (so ~50 MB/s) and you’re relying on SD card endurance, but for “something is better than nothing” situations, it can work—even as a lightweight boot option. I also give a quick honorable mention to a tiny M.2 5GbE adapter because it’s a really nice value when you don’t want to pay 10GbE money. From there things get weirder: a quad-gig M.2 solution that (for me) didn’t work and likely cooked itself, a PCIe 2.5GbE NIC that can actually supply PoE+ (still not sure who asked for that, but it did work), and a 2.5"-sized adapter that fits two M.2 SATA SSDs with hardware RAID/JBOD—complete with port multiplier gotchas and the usual 2025 “hardware RAID vs ZFS” tradeoffs. And yeah… I need more of these for a part two.