Kubuntu on M2 PCIe disk?

[rikona]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 01:41:03 +0100
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 at 00:59, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:
> >
> > Home built; has an ASUS 970_PRO_GAMING_AURA MoBo; AMD proc.  
> 
> *Googles* -- OK.
> >  
> > > Does it have an M2 interface?  
> >
> > Yes - PCIe, but the manual doesn't say which one. I'm assuming 3
> > since a bit old...  
> 
> Yes, looks like SATA SSDs will fit but not work:
> https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/asus-970-pro-gaming-aura-not-recognizing-m-2-sandisk-x400.2647288/

I think what they're mostly talking about is not being able to boot from
an M2 drive, which apparently needs a bunch of extra fiddling to make
that happen, and maybe not possible with some MoBos. If you boot up from
another kind of drive, the M2 may then be visible and usable as a drive.

But, I learned that my 970 board only supports PCIe 2 x4. I've heard
that some newer M2 boards may have backwards compatibility, but speed
will be limited by the MoBo specs. The new boards all advertise
fantastic transfer speeds, which is what attracted me to this option.
But, when I checked the numbers, I will only get about ** 1/15th ** of
the latest technology speed, which is actually not much better than
what I would get with a SATA 3 drive. So, even though it sounded great
at the beginning, this may not end up to be as good as I thought it
would be, and I might as well just use a SATA3 drive. Much easier, and
no fiddling. :-)

> > That's what I was thinking originally but (1) I noticed that M2
> > PCIe has a much faster interface speed than SATA, but (2) there
> > seemed to be many problems with M2s so thought I'd better ask.  
> 
> Compatibility is a minefield with these.
> 
> After I bought my Thinkpad X220, I found its WWAN card slot can
> support an mSATA SSD, so I bought a used one cheap & now I have 2
> drives in a small executive-type ultraportable. This is great.
> 
> I recently helped a friend buy a cheap big beast -- he wanted a 15.6"
> screen. We found a decently-priced Thinkpad W510. Just one generation
> older but its WWAN slot doesn't support SATA disks at all.
> 
> > Will try the HD boot/run + large database on the M2.  
> 
> That seems a bit back-asswards, TBH.
> 
> SATA SSDs are cheap now. Even a small one is enough for a Linux root
> partition: 64GB is plenty. I got a 120GB one free that is in my
> girlfriend's MacBook Pro. I upgraded a friend's Core i3 Win10 laptop
> with a 500GB SSD a couple of months ago, which cost about €50.
> 
> I'd say the ideal would be:
> / on SATA SSD
> /home on hard disk

My apologies, I did not describe the plan accurately. This is actually
what I'm doing on 16.04. I mentioned HD just to differentiate from an
M2 boot up.

> /nvme or /db or something additional like that for your NVMe drive.

This looks like a good idea. Would it be better to format that new SATA
3 SSD [instead of M2 NVMe] with that mount point before assembling the
box, or just install/format later?

If I decide to break the bank :-)) and get a very large single SSD
instead of the above 3-drive solution, is there any disadvantage in
having everything on one drive [assuming I do frequent backups and/or
clones]?

Thanks, again...