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)_/¯