NVMe: was Building a Linux Computer?

[Brian Cluff]

On an older system while you can add a PCI card to the system, in a lot 
of cases you won't be able to boot off of it without motherboard 
support.  You can get around that by keeping a spinning drive or a small 
ssd or USB crive that actually boots the system and then immediately 
hands over to the root partition on the NVMe letting you have your cake 
and eat it too.

While a pure PCIe based card  is quite expensive, you can get a PCI card 
that will give you an M.2 slot for around $13 and up.  The nice thing 
about getting the adapter, other than saving some money, is that most 
new motherboards are shipping with one or more NVMe m.2 slots, so you 
will be able to carry your drive over to a new computer when you decide 
to upgrade.

Brian Cluff

On 05/22/2018 02:50 PM, Stephen Partington wrote:
> there are a few ways to get an NVMe drive in your system. M.2 PCIe 
> based drive. you can also buy a PCIe card to mount one as well as a 
> PCIe card that is integrated. There is also a U.2 which was aimed more 
> towards Server architecture.
>
> a x1 slot has a single direction BW of 2.5 Gbps/200MBps and x4 slot 
> can move 1 Gbps/800MBps
>
> so most NVMe based m.2 drives are wired to 2 or 4 lanes. In your case 
> a 4x PCIe slot would be a great deal of performance even over the 
> normal SATA bandwidth.
>
> the PCIe cards do have a fair amount of cost added to them.
>
> On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 2:30 PM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com 
> <mailto:slitt at troubleshooters.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Tue, 22 May 2018 13:57:29 -0700
>     Brian Cluff <brian at snaptek.com <mailto:brian at snaptek.com>> wrote:
>
>     > For me, I would get a system that can use a NVMe.  They are
>     about the
>     > same price as an SSD, but make and SSD look extremely slow.
>
>     This is the first I've heard of NVMe. I just read
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVM_Express
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVM_Express> , and now have some
>     questions:
>
>     1) Can I replace the spinning platter 2.5" hard disk in my 5 year old
>        laptop with an NVMe device? My research tells me an NVMe must plug
>        into a PCIe slot rather than a SATA slot.
>
>     2) Do you fstrim NVMe-hosted partitions the same way you do for SSD?
>
>     3) When you install an NVMe card in a PCIe slot, what device name
>     shows
>        up? Is it sd-whatever, or something else?
>
>     4) If my desktop has a free PCIe slot, does that mean I can plug in an
>        NVIe drive and use it?
>
>     Thanks,
>
>     SteveT
>
>     Steve Litt
>     June 2018 featured book: Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
>     http://www.troubleshooters.com/28 <http://www.troubleshooters.com/28>
>
>
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>
> -- 
> A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from 
> rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.
>
> Stephen
>
>
>
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