[GTALUG] Booting Fedora from M.2 Optane Nvme

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:02:06AM -0400, Russell wrote:
> Yea, this is just a tinker-toy. I had figured to put a small backup OS on this, remove its allocation from the chainloader and then leave it alone in the box in case I need it, instead of using a live usb for troubleshooting etc. 
> 
> It doesn't look like I can mask it's physical presence tho, except by populating a pcie slot and co-opting it's assigned pci lanes, so no security through obscurity.
> 
> Instead I went with full Fedora w/gnome. I have 7gib on the drive after a full workstation install so I may rethink stuff and use it as my primary. Optane was meant to be a cache accelerator for booting Windows 10 on a standard drive and thats about the sum of it. 
> 
> Although, with all the elbow room and thumbscrews in this box, you could use it as a key drive for sneakernet backup to a safety deposit box pretty handily. You'd just need the right finger screw for the 1_M.2 slot standoff post, which is exposed. The other slot is buried under a heat sink.

Well as a toy, $90 is easier to justify than $170.

Not sure how many insertions that M.2 slot is rated for.  I don't think
I would do anything that involves frequent swapping.

An external thunderbolt connected NVMe drive would survive that much
better.

-- 
Len Sorensen