Re: Evm M.2 Nvme Ssd 128gb
Nahuel Anschutz
I just built a new PC yesterday and am trying to install Arch on the 2TB nvme drive which will be my main one. Currently I only have 8GB of RAM because I am still waiting for my 4x32GB sticks to arrive (relevant info for swap partition question later). I plan on mainly using this Arch install, and having a small 240GB SSD with windows for those situations where I absolutely need it. So linux and windows will be installed on separate drives. Will I need to follow the steps for dualbooting in the arch wiki installation guide, or do I just need to add the windows SSD to my grub after installing windows on it?
I read in this fedora article that for over 64GB of ram with hibernation the recommended swap size is 4GB. Do I not need to scale it up? Elsewhere I read that it's supposed to be RAM+2GB so I'm unsure which information is correct. Currently I only have 8GB but any day now the 128GB sticks I ordered will be arriving. Is it possible/easy to increase swap size if I need it?
I have the space on this drive so even if 200GB is too much for the / partition, what would be your recommendation (again, keeping in mind that I plan on having quite a few games installed at a time)? Almost everything I'm reading suggests 20-50, but I have a feeling it wont be enough.
You might want to skip a swap and just use some of the 128GB as compressed swap. I use the the zram-generator and enable it by the kernel boot option "systemd.zram". No other config than that and it works faster than a drive and doesn't wear your drives. You have plenty of memory to spare. You won't have hibernation support without a drive swap area though so there is a trade-off.
Since it's all on the same underlying drive then you shouldn't need much. /boot has to be separate for startup, but then / could be the rest of the drive. Filesystem also matters and before you go ahead and install everything you might want to consider if you'd use something like btrfs which has lots of advanced features.
Both articles you sent were very helpful, and regarding btrfs I decided to not use it and stick with what I know + what is well tested. Also, I watched some videos on it, and while the subvolumes are interesting, I came to the conclusion that due to the size of my drive, its not necessary to allow them to use that feature.
I think that's a sensible layout. / = 200 GB you might want to increase just-in-case as there are many directories under / that will take up space and taking that from /home wouldn't matter much unless you intend to have big things in /home like games. The reason you might want to pad / now is that if you realize that you needed more space later it is more problematic to solve then. The amount of swap needed to hibernate 128 GB of RAM though really needs to be sure, because once things are set again they become debt later down the line.
Thanks for reaching out to us, I am sorry but this SSD is not compatible with our USB-C to NVMe enclosure. While I cannot quite make out the model number, this appears to be a PCIe AHCI SSD. This type of drive can utilize 2 or 4 PCI express lanes and has an embedded single-drive SATA host controller built into the SSD itself, but is not compatible with the NVMe standards.
A quick way to check is to look for the NVMe Logo on the SSD, in this case the drive only has the PCI Express logo and no NVMe logo. We have a list of supported and tested SSD on our product page ( -nvme ).
M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 256GB SSD
M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 x2 128GB SSD
M.2 SATA3 256GB SSD
This being a 128GB SSD points to it being an NVMe SSD, however I do not know if it will be compatible with our USB-C to NVMe enclosure as we have not tested any NVMe SSDs with a B-Key cutout. Normally the B-Key cutout is for 2 PCIe lanes and SATA devices while NVMe is most commonly uses 4 PCIe lanes.
I wanted to update my last comment. We have purchased a Kingston A1000 PCIe 2x Lane PCIe NVMe SSD and tested with our enclosure. The drive is correctly detected and can be formatted and used in our enclosure. Most of the PCIe 2x lane NVMe SSDs are classified as economy drives and have poor performance compared to the 4x lane NVMe SSDs, this is reflected in the performance with our enclosure as well. Even when connected to a USB 3.1 Gen 2 controller the PCIe 2x lane drives will have significantly reduced performance compared to a 4x lane drive.
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