[GTALUG] Booting Fedora from M.2 Optane Nvme

[Russell]

On March 19, 2018 11:20:09 AM EDT, lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca wrote:
>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.

I wouldn't recommend it commercially or for production, but personal privacy may take a lot of different forms and methods. In a sense nonstandard can be a good thing. 

There is a pcie adapter for M.2 so I imagine that some amount of removal and insertion is built into the lifespan of the product, albeit without warranty of purpose.

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

In fact I just wanted to look at a measure of cache performance mitigations for now. 

Onboard recovery OS or, deposit box storage of the card w/os & data, are just a way of self justifing the cost of playing around with Linux and perhaps extending the scope of my tinkering. 

Externals are possibly subject to theft, loss and impact damage from falling off the desk. Stuff attached on the inside of the box, is just a bit more inconvienent to access and that makes it a little more physically secure.

Three second delay for bios and three more seconds to login prompt, pretty much changed my mind about useage of this card. 

I'll probably use it as my primary drive for the time being. There is an apparent improvement in browsing the web. Seems like pages load faster than on the SSD, but that may just be wishfull thinking.

All in good fun. 

>
>-- 
>Len Sorensen

-- 
Russell