On 05/31/2018 08:55 PM, John Morris wrote:
On Fri, 2018-05-25 at 15:40 -0700, Mike Wright wrote:
newegg has a good price on the 512G HP EX920 M.2 ($180US) NVMe SSD drives this weekend.
I can find no references to this part and Linux. Everything refers to Windows (and the problems they're having with it).
This is supposed to be the latest, greatest, fastest, blabla, etc.
Anybody familiar with this re: Linux?
Assuming it doesn't have any glitches unique to it, Fedora has no problem with an NVMe drive. So long as your BIOS / UEFI firmware supports booting from it you should be good. If you use multiple distros you may find support isn't universal yet. I know PCLinuxOS has problems, they warned about it but I got it to install onto one with some manual fussing. Don't really do a lot of Windows but yea, keep hearing about it being a challenge there unless it is a vendor preload. The PCLinuxOS was on a laptop with a preload of Win10 and it still dual booted ok after the mucking around with UEFI. NVMe is a big break from the old IDE drive world, really expected more breakage.
Big break indeed. It took a while to figure out where to begin.
Start by using "nvme" to perform a device specific type of format. This type of format is not mountable. Next turn it into a block device usable by lvm2: pvcreate /dev/nvme0n1 then use that in a volume group: vgcreate NVME /dev/nvme0n1. That turned the device into a pool of 477G available to logical volumes. Using lvcreate I made a 100G partition. At that point I could now deal with it as a regular block device.
mkfs.ext4 /dev/NVME/part1 and, !blink!, it was done. 100G format in a fraction of a second. My head is still smoking from that one and I can't wipe this grin off of my face ;D
For spit and giggles I pulled in a 1.8G iso and performed a "dd" from the nvme onto a USB3.1 thumb drive. Too fast to measure: perhaps a second?
So, in conclusion, it appears that the HP EX920 is, indeed, ready for prime time wrt Linux.
Bad news: I'm now spoiled rotten... rotating media feels like a fly stuck in amber ¯_(ツ)_/¯