[SOLVED] Support for M.2 drives?

[chowse]

Hello All,
My 13 y/o grandson and I are researching hardware to build him a Linux computer.
We know we want an Intel Core i3 10100, 16 GB ram, and an SSD.
I'd like to pair a 2.5" SSD as the boot drive, and a M.2 drive as an additional drive for backup., since I just happen to have one from a decommissioned laptop.
He'll LOVE Linux, especially on a really fast computer.

Is there any reason Linux Mint won't support this?
Are there any special steps we need to take, such as install the M.2 AFTER installing the OS?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I would use the M.2 drive for the boot drive and either use the 2.5" SSD in a USB external enclosure for backup or installed in the computer for data only and a second one for an external backup drive. My own laptop uses a small M.2 NVMe drive for the boot drive (I only keep the OS and programs on it) and multiple separate SSDs for the data. My backup drives are all in external enclosures.

Installing a backup drive in a computer is risky. If something goes wrong in the computer (or you make a mistake) that takes out your boot drive, your data drive could also be taken out. If the laptop gets stolen, the backup will go with it. External backup drives are much, much safer.

[spamegg]

I recently bought an M.2 SSD, plugged it in to my motherboard, booted into Gparted Live, formatted it to Ext4, rebooted, and my already existing Mint installation immediately saw it and it works perfectly. Then I edited /etc/fstab so it is mounted automatically at boot. Done!

[rene]

As a probably not useful reply --- but take it for what it's worth --- do be sure you are in fact talking about an M.2 drive rather than an mSATA one (googling will show pictures). Said only since at this point in history already decommissioned laptops are definitely more likely to have an mSATA driver rather than the newer M.2, and they are frequently confused terminology-wise.

Generally an M.2 drive is much faster than a SATA or mSATA one so I'd indeed swap intended usage if in fact it is M.2...

[wallyUSA]

@chowse:

Installing a backup drive in a computer is risky.

Backup drives should be external and disconnected when not in use

[Lady Fitzgerald]

@chowse:

Installing a backup drive in a computer is risky.

Backup drives should be external and disconnected when not in use

Exactly!

[Moonstone Man]

I'd like to pair a 2.5" SSD as the boot drive, and a M.2 drive as an additional drive for backup., since I just happen to have one from a decommissioned laptop.

M.2 drives that have a NVMe interface, rather than SATA, are far and away faster than a SATA SSD. Putting the OS on the SSD and using the M.2 for storage might, depending on the specifications of the M.2, be a complete and utter waste of an otherwise perfectly good M.2 drive.

[chowse]

As a probably not useful reply --- but take it for what it's worth --- do be sure you are in fact talking about an M.2 drive rather than an mSATA one (googling will show pictures). Said only since at this point in history already decommissioned laptops are definitely more likely to have an mSATA driver rather than the newer M.2, and they are frequently confused terminology-wise.

Generally an M.2 drive is much faster than a SATA or mSATA one so I'd indeed swap intended usage if in fact it is M.2...

Sincere apologies, but I can't seem to get a picture to paste between the [img] [\img]
Please Google "Intel Optane Memory H10 with Solid State Storage". Mine is the 256 GB on the top row.

[motoryzen]

Installing a backup drive in a computer is risky

-_- Walking outside your home is risky. Cooking is risky. Jees. It's not any more risky then any general basic task in life.

If you connected it externally and ensure you only have it connected when you're doing a backup or testing that backup, then it's all good to go. Just ensure you format the backup drive applicably to match what works best with either that distro or operating system. It's, overall, that simple.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Installing a backup drive in a computer is risky

-_- Walking outside your home is risky. Cooking is risky. Jees. It's not any more risky then any general basic task in life.

If you connected it externally and ensure you only have it connected when you're doing a backup or testing that backup, then it's all good to go. Just ensure you format the backup drive applicably to match what works best with either that distro or operating system. It's, overall, that simple.

You're contradicting yourself. And I did say to use external drives for backups so what's your beef?

[motoryzen]

Installing a backup drive in a computer is risky

-_- Walking outside your home is risky. Cooking is risky. Jees. It's not any more risky then any general basic task in life.

If you connected it externally and ensure you only have it connected when you're doing a backup or testing that backup, then it's all good to go. Just ensure you format the backup drive applicably to match what works best with either that distro or operating system. It's, overall, that simple.

You're contradicting yourself. And I did say to use external drives for backups so what's your beef?

Ah..NO..lol. I'm not contradicting myself. Apparently you don't know what the word " contradicting" means, and I don't know where you're getting that from.

I just simply replied to a particular part of your comment. You're the one that said Installing a backup drive in a computer is risky. I simply disagreed and cited a sensible reasoning as to why. What's the problem?

It's more risky not to have a backup drive. It's nothing personal and not meant as an insult. Just the facts of digital life.

How complicated is it to set up a backup drive?

Plug it into or connect it with some sort of external sata to usb adapter, ( and plug up the power cord if it's not a usb-self powering small drive/adapter solution), plug it into the PC, format it to a format to a coherent type, and either copy and paste what you want to manually backup.....or use it as a Timeshift snapshots backup or a third party System Image Backup target drive. *shrugs*. There ya go.

[rene]

Please Google "Intel Optane Memory H10 with Solid State Storage". Mine is the 256 GB on the top row.

Yowza. Intel Optane? That's some decommissioned laptop...

As Kadaitcha Man pointed out I should earlier in fact have specified that an NVMe M.2 drive tends to be far faster than SATA, mSATA or M.2-SATA drives as latter certainly exist --- but it's here then the case that we're talking about NVMe and in fact not a standard M.2 NVMe flash-based SSD but groovy Intel Optane. In any case, specs I can find on it indicate max. sequential read resp. write of 2400MB/s resp. 1800 MB/s:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/in ... ,6094.html

This compares to SATA speeds of around 550 MB/s read/write for the best SATA3 drives (in whichever form-factor; 2.5", mSATA, M2-SATA); write often a bit slower. I.e., definitely make that Optane drive your boot drive: tremendous waste using that as storage only.

[rene]

Oh, and by the way, no, you don't have to do anything special. You can during the install use whichever drive for the Linux install (a 256G drive is still okay to just use as one, large /-filesystem, with /home not split off). Any additional storage drive you can set up at install time as well, for example to be mounted on /data or /mnt/data or /mnt/backup or... but also after the fact.

[chowse]

Please Google "Intel Optane Memory H10 with Solid State Storage". Mine is the 256 GB on the top row.

Yowza. Intel Optane? That's some decommissioned laptop...
... definitely make that Optane drive your boot drive: tremendous waste using that as storage only.

Thank you all very much. The issue is settled. Optane as boot, ssd as something else.

[rene]

Don't know how hardware-savvy you guys are, but be sure to get him that 16G as a 2x8G DDR4-2666 kit to make use of dual-channel...

[Lady Fitzgerald]

-_- Walking outside your home is risky. Cooking is risky. Jees. It's not any more risky then any general basic task in life.

If you connected it externally and ensure you only have it connected when you're doing a backup or testing that backup, then it's all good to go. Just ensure you format the backup drive applicably to match what works best with either that distro or operating system. It's, overall, that simple.

You're contradicting yourself. And I did say to use external drives for backups so what's your beef?

Ah..NO..lol. I'm not contradicting myself. Apparently you don't know what the word " contradicting" means, and I don't know where you're getting that from.

I just simply replied to a particular part of your comment. You're the one that said Installing a backup drive in a computer is risky. I simply disagreed and cited a sensible reasoning as to why. What's the problem?...

The problem is installing a backup drive in a computer is risky for reasons I've already explained (another one is malware, especially ransomware, that a user allows onto their computer via responding to a spoofed email, etc.) not to mention the unnecessarily snarky way you responded. Then you turn around and say one is "good to go" if the backup drive is connected externally as though it's preferable to an internal backup drive and I had not mentioned using external backup drives. That may not have been what you meant but it was what I saw.

...It's more risky not to have a backup drive...

How complicated is it to set up a backup drive?

Plug it into or connect it with some sort of external sata to usb adapter, ( and plug up the power cord if it's not a usb-self powering small drive/adapter solution), plug it into the PC, format it to a format to a coherent type, and either copy and paste what you want to manually backup.....or use it as a Timeshift snapshots backup or a third party System Image Backup target drive. *shrugs*. There ya go.

Now that I can agree with. I prefer to keep my System files and my data separated, either on separate drives or separate partitions (depending on the computer) to simplify backups. I use Timeshift backups more like System Restore was supposed to work in Windows (for me, it was iffy in XP and didn't work at all in Win 7) and keep the snapshots on a data drive in the computer and also on an external backup drive.

I backup the System files on my M.2 NVMe drive by imaging with Clonezilla (it's the only program I've found so far that will work with my miserable, misbegotten NVIDIA card) and testing an image every so often by "restoring" it to another NVMe drive in an external USB enclosure then swapping out the drives.

I use a folder/file syncing program called FreeFileSync (FFS) to backup my data drives (or partition). FFS compares the data drive with the backup drive, then copies any new or changed files on the data drive to the backup drive. It also "deletes" data on the backup drive that's not on the data drive from the backup drive (deleted files get sent to a Versioning folder; that protects against data loss due to file corruption or accidental deletion). The result is essentially a "clone" of the data drive on the backup drive. Since only new, changed, or deleted files are involved, updating backups can be fast with far fewer drive writes. Being GUI driven dramatically simplifies updating backups.

[chowse]

Don't know how hardware-savvy you guys are, but be sure to get him that 16G as a 2x8G DDR4-2666 kit to make use of dual-channel...

We're using pcpartpicker to be sure there are no incompatibility issues. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/GdYpPV is our current list.
We're not that hardware-savvy. Can you explain if DDR4-3200 would be suitable or not?

[rene]

We're not that hardware-savvy. Can you explain if DDR4-3200 would be suitable or not?

Yes, it would be: it'll with the i3-10100 be limited to 2666 (on B460, i5 and i7 can go up to 2933) but when I quickly check prices DDR4-2666 isn't cheaper. Given that your pick will potentially be higher-quality chips and/or that you might be able able to get slightly better timings out of it than advertised, yes, I'd say that's perfectly suitable.

Nice board with fair VRM-cooling (for a 65W TDP CPU not in fact important but still nice) and 4 RAM slots, so open to upgrade later to 32G if ever so desired. Also nice chip at the very least at its $120 MSRP; 4C/8T with a 3.6GHz base, 4.1GHz all-core boost, 4.3GHz single-core boost. Definitely fast and in fact fast enough to be able to upgrade later with a nice GPU to get a pretty good gaming experience out of; I mean, you did say he was 13...

In that context also checked the PSU via an online PSU calculator and while I'd personally due to that possible later upgrade go for a 550W one you actually still have enough room for say a 3060 with 450W also. I'd still consider 550W though if upgrade with a dedicated GPU is ever a possibility; for example https://www.newegg.com/seasonic-s12g-55 ... 0019-002T4 (although non-modular).

I see you're paying $175 for the 10100 due to it being out of stock everywhere and at that price point I thought there'd be likely more options available, but well, maybe not in fact given desire for now for integrated GPU. It's also going to be perfectly fine with the stock cooler.

[chowse]

We're not that hardware-savvy. Can you explain if DDR4-3200 would be suitable or not?

I see you're paying $175 for the 10100 due to it being out of stock everywhere and at that price point I thought there'd be likely more options available, but well, maybe not in fact given desire for now for integrated GPU. It's also going to be perfectly fine with the stock cooler.

I found an 10100 on Amazon for $142 delivered, and ordered it.
That helps the budget for this build, though we still need desk, monitor, and kbd/mouse.
I sort of solved the external backup issue. We have a raspberry pi running on a 128GB SSD, and there's lots of space available.
I added him as a user on the pi, and added his home folder to the Samba shares on the pi. Now he can backup to there.

[rene]

Yes, at $142 that's a nice CPU. By the way: when I said the thing about the VRM-cooling I was looking at a picture of the Gigabyte B460M DS3H AC which in fact specifically features a beefy heatsink over the non-AC version --- but don't get me wrong, that's not to say it's not in fact a nice board; it is, and very suitable for a 10100.

For monitor, resolution is going to be the main thing to decide on (and integrated audio might, seeing as how he apparently doesn't yet have an existing setup but never expect that to actually be worth anything audio-wise; none are). Now that you had me look...

The 10100's integrated GPU does 4096x2304 at 60Hz via DP but apparently only 4096x2160 at 30Hz via HDMI according to

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... 0-ghz.html

but it seems your chosen Gigabyte B460M-DS3H does not feature DP:

https://www.gigabyte.com/nl/Motherboard ... -rev-10#kf

Don't know if any price-comparable boards in fact do, but if you'd be getting a 4K-monitor, that might then be something to additionally look at.

For mouse and keyboard, and certainly if gaming is not a priority, hard to go wrong with a Logitech set like https://www.newegg.com/logitech-wireles ... 6823126332 although he at 13 might of course care for a bit of LED-fun

Desk: Ikea...