Kubuntu on M2 PCIe disk?

[rikona]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 09:29:44 +0000
Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 09:24:25AM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 09:52:49PM -0700, rikona wrote:  
> > > It's upgrade time, from 16.04... Considering putting a new
> > > install of Kubuntu on a new M2 PCIe disk to improve performance a
> > > bit [same old box otherwise]. Would this be a normal UEFI
> > > large-disk install, as on a hard disk, or is there more to it?
> > > Any problems, issues, etc? Any interaction specific to just
> > > Kubuntu with a new M2 PCIe disk, or does the desktop not make any
> > > difference? Anyone actually done this? Hoping for just a plain
> > > vanilla install, but saw several adverse online comments re
> > > Ubuntu on M2 PCIes... 
> > I added a PCIe disk to my desktop system recently and installed
> > 20.04 on it.  Once I was through the issues of getting the PCIe
> > disk visible to the OS at boot time there was no problem at all
> > getting Linux installed on it.
> > 
> > I did have quite a few conversations with the very helpful denizens
> > of the help-grub at gnu.org mailing list getting the boot side of
> > things sorted.
> >   
> Ah, it's coming back to me now! 
> 
> The major issue I had was that the PCIe disk *wasn't* recognised by
> the BIOS so I had to configure things so that the system still booted
> of (one of) the SATA disks but the new OS was installed on the PCIe
> disk.

Thanks to you and Oliver for pointing to where the problems are likely
to be - in the BIOS. This seems to be consistent with a number of
things I saw online - "Dell doesn't support that" or "WD doesn't
support that", but not describing exactly what the problem was. This
does not sound like it's going to be a vanilla install. :-((

I have another thought: one of the main reasons I want to improve
performance is to speed up searching. I have a few Tb of data, and use
a recoll indexed search to find things on my box. Given the amount of
data, though, the index is VERY large, and a complex search can take
2-3 minutes to complete. I use this search quite a bit and would like
to reduce the time.

A possible alternate solution might be to install Kubuntu on a hard
disk, which I assume is just a vanilla install, and set up the recoll
index files on the PCIe drive. That might let recoll go through the
very large index files much faster and speed up the result. The box is
adequately fast for other tasks, so this might be a possible
alternative. Does this sound like a good approach, or am I missing
something?

But, I would still need to have the M2 drive recognized after booting
and running from the hard disk. Are the mods still needed to get the M2
drive recognized *at all*, even after you boot up from a hard disk, and
run the OS on the hard drive?