I was thinking something more you could hide discretely behind it like that little sleeve, or just double-side tape to it somewhere.  I was a bit surprised to see just how small those nvme disks were unboxing them, sort of like a long thumbdrive side, with a lot of potential speed.  Shame TB1-2 devices are still stupidly expensive, presuming they are seeking to take advantage of already overpaying apple owners.

I was reading some threads about dell and intel working on getting TB/USB-based pci-e bus extension working properly in the linux kernel to do things like native access as a pci-extension for storage and graphics.  Dell/Alienware sell TB3 docks that are simply usb-c or usb3.1 devices that can take a real video card, or extend displayport graphics over them, in theory looking like it was plugged into a pci socket virtually.  Windoze only until recently of course, but seems effort is being made.  Perhaps one day...

Of course, this is also how people are dma attacking macs and other devices for password recovery...

http://blog.frizk.net/2016/12/filevault-password-retrieval.html

-mb

On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 4:38 PM, Stephen Partington <cryptworks@gmail.com> wrote:
The little booger has TB2 and USB3 so something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4P03C27102 would work pretty well for large scale storage expansion.

On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 3:28 PM, Michael Butash <michael@butash.net> wrote:
Not overly familiar with the macs, but as long as it has a real usb3 or higher port, I'd consider something like this externally to your 2 internal spinners, usb 3+ to m.2/nvme drive adapter:


Usb3 is 3-4 gigabit practical speed in theory and should sustain decent enough i/o to make use of that.  If it's new enough to have a thunderbolt 3/usb3.1 connection, those are supposedly 10 gigabit capable for roughly 2x the throughput.

Maybe Eric should head to west texas and sue them for infringement, with Oyen Tech.  ;)

This looked nifty too for thunderbolt3/usb3.1...


-mb

On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 1:55 PM, Stephen Partington <cryptworks@gmail.com> wrote:
I have done it with my LVMcache based solution without issue. Currently am running that on a Mac mini server If i could get a pair of spinners in there with an SSD cache i would.


On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 1:36 PM, Michael Butash <michael@butash.net> wrote:
How does one handle redundant disks *properly* or *officially* with EFI?

First/Last time I dealt with EFI was an asus that had 2x SSD's (factory raid 0[!]) that I intended to raid 1 for redundancy vs. performance.  It had no legacy boot option at all (shame, asus), so I was forced to work with it.  I eventually got my recipe up on it with mdadm, crypto, and lvm with ubuntu after weeks of fiddling with it, but never really figured out a better way to deal with efi partition.  I had setup a cronjob to rsync the efi directory, never really tested the actual failure scenario and/or recovery however before I gave up on the laptop otherwise (and job).

Maybe that is/was good enough, just wasn't sure how well the efi bios would switch up disks like that, as something at the time made me believe it wouldn't.  I've read efi is somewhat fakeraid aware, perhaps that's an option since mdadm works with fakeraids too...

Surely I'm not the only one to do redundant disks in desktops, but do seem to be one of an odd few.

-mb

On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 12:06 PM, Kevin Fries <kevin@fries-biro.com> wrote:
I suspect the issue was more with UDev and those fancy new drives.  I just wiped then installed Arch on a brand new HP laptop with GPT, zero issues.  I especially like the lack of a separate /boot partition by reusing the EFI/GPT boot sector.

Personally, my install was very straightforward and stable as hell.

Kevin

On Dec 20, 2016 9:13 AM, "Michael Butash" <michael@butash.net> wrote:
I agree, this is why I keep separate /usr partitions, both to allow for growth, and to monitor my growth.  Another weird thing Arch has such a difficult time booting with a separate /usr, more like the dev's ass-u-me again no one will *ever* do this...

I started doing it as a means of checks for watching growth over the years.  In the old days of 8.04, usually a 4gb partition for /usr was fine, and less than a gig for actual root (/).  Now I fill /usr with at least 6gb of data on install it seems, 7-8gb is more the norm.

Use of GPT is/was really trying to keep up with tech, where early days of SSD, fdisk was terrible about alignment, where most things can and still do say to use GPT.  Just no one tells you it is inherently broken still on most platforms to consider booting off of.

I'd be more inclined to try EFI, but I'm fond of consistent raid approaches, even for boot partitions, where the inflexible FatFS nature of EFI partition just rubs me the wrong way as it can't be made natively redundant like I can with /boot being on mdraid partitions happily booting linux otherwise.  Curious what others do with redundancy around EFI desktop drives...

Even without another shed of M$ on here, it still finds a way to screw things up.

-mb

On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 12:09 AM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
On Mon, 19 Dec 2016 23:17:38 -0700
Michael Butash <michael@butash.net> wrote:

> I really had no idea GPT was such an anomaly still.  Everything I
> read was like "just do it!".  Not.

At this point in time, laptop hard disks still aren't big enough to
require EFI, and desktops have multiple disks. So what I do on laptops
that can still do MBR is MBR format the hard disk.

With my daily driver desktop, with a 4TB disk, and a 3TB disk, and a
256GB SSD, I MBR boot to the SSD, which also contains the whole /usr
and /etc tree for easy bootability in these days of symlinked /usr. So
I get the advantages of GPT on my large disks, the simple booting of
MBR on my SSD: It works fast and beautifully.

SteveT

Steve Litt
December 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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