Hello, Walter. On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 17:05:07 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: > It was nice to have a newer "hot backup" (XPS8940) to switch over to > quickly when an older machine started locking up occasionally. Now I > need a "hot backup" for the newer machine that I ordered last October. > Dell Inspirons seem to top out at 12 gigs ram, so I'm looking for an XPS > model in order to get more ram as the bloating of linux continues. All > current XPS models seem to have 256G or 512G M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State > drives in the base configuration. Questions...
> * do NVMe drives function well under Gentoo (driver issues, etc)? Yes. Without reservation. You need to enable NVMe in the kernel, and there is a user-level program for doing things to them (like checking number of reads/writes). There is no great problem setting up a boot loader, any more than for any other sort of drive. > * how long do they hold up (wear and tear)? I've had a pair of Samsung 500Gb nvmes in RAID-1 in my 4 year old machine since it was new. As yet I've had no problems with them. In fact, the machine has never known spinning rust. > * can I simply disable them if I run into problems? If you've got something to fall back onto, yes. > If someone can suggest an alternate supplier to Dell, that ships to > greater Toronto, at similar prices, I'd be willing to take a look at > them. I can't comment at all on that. I built my machine from components. The only slightly tricky bit was finding a PCIe card to hold the second NVMe drive. > -- > Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> > I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
