Mailing List Archive

On Thursday, 27 May 2021 22:05:07 BST 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)?
>
> * how long do they hold up (wear and tear)?
>
> * can I simply disable them if I run into problems?
>
> 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'll leave others to comment on NVMe drives, I've not had any experience with
these.

Dell used to satisfy a sweet spot between price and performance, compared to
other more expensive mass producers. I have not purchased any of their
products for some years now. I found the choice they offer to customise some
components was great, but as soon as you asked for something different in ways
that matter to horsepower (CPU, RAM or graphics) the price offering stopped
being attractive. Funny enough, the component which failed just after the
warranty expired was not CPU, RAM, or graphics, but the PSU.

Having suffered similar kind of failures with other mass market box-shifters
I've learned my lesson. Have you looked at building your own box? The bang
for your buck should go farther, because for the same money you should be able
to get better components.

On Thu 27 May 2021 17:05:07 GMT, Walter Dnes wrote:
> * do NVMe drives function well under Gentoo (driver issues, etc)?

I have a NVMe drive on my corporate laptop (a lenovo) and I don’t have
any issue with it.

PS: I agree on the linux bloatiness, I have 4G of RAM on my personal
laptop and it begins to run out sometime…

--
Alarig

On 5/27/21 3:05 PM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> 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)?

I've not had any problems with them. They do show up as a different device:

/dev/nvme0n1p#

Where # is the partition number. I think /dev/nvme0 might be the first
NVMe controller as the only NVMe (card?) that I have is /dev/nvme0n1.

> * how long do they hold up (wear and tear)?

I've been using the inexpensive ~> cheap one that I have for more than
18 months. I'm using a partition on said NVMe as a cache for my ZFS
pool. I've not yet seen any symptoms of problems.

I will say, that you want to make sure the system has PCIe that's 3.0 or
better to take advantage of the full speed. -- My existing NVMe is in
a PCIe-16x slot to NVMe adapter card. It only uses 4x lanes, but the
other are physically occupied holding the card.

I'm building a new system, to replace the 5+ year old XPX w/ PCIe 2.0
that has the card and I'm replying from with a newer system with quite
similar, save for PCIe 3.0. The speed difference between the NVMe in
the systems is insane with the faster PCIe bus.

> * can I simply disable them if I run into problems?

That depends.

If they are used for part of the operating system, as in your boot /
root drive, then simply disabling them will be ... problematic. If
however, you are using it as a non-essential drive, or not using it at
all, then sure, you can disable it.



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 11:35:33PM +0200, Alarig Le Lay wrote

> PS: I agree on the linux bloatiness, I have 4G of RAM on my personal
> laptop and it begins to run out sometime???

Showing my age... I started using linux on a spare machine with
16 ***MEGA***bytes of ram approx year 1999 or 2000, and the ram was
perfectly sufficient.

--
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

On 5/27/21 4:47 PM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> Showing my age... I started using linux on a spare machine with 16
> ***MEGA***bytes of ram approx year 1999 or 2000, and the ram was
> perfectly sufficient.

Yep. I did similar.

Though I think /what/ is done *and* /how/ it is done are significantly
different now than they were ~20 years ago.

Thunderbird and Firefox are my big RAM consumers that are open all the
time. Virtual Machines use more (and are one of the reasons I'm
building a new system) memory, but they aren't open all the time.

Ignoring the SSL / TLS connection issues, I don't know if a distro from
~20 years ago could do what I want to do today. I know that my email
workload is multiple orders of magnitude larger today than back then.
/If/ Netscape Communicator /can/ handle my email (via an SSL / TLS proxy
like stunnel), then we have some big problems. -- /me grumbles as he's
now probably going to end up trying things.

Aside: I wonder if I can get around the SSL/TLS issue by leveraging
IPsec to protect credentials between the external IPs and configure
Netscape Communicator for stock IMAP & SMTP.



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

On 5/27/21 3:05 PM, 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)?
>
> * how long do they hold up (wear and tear)?
>
> * can I simply disable them if I run into problems?
>
> 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 have M.2 in four machines (recently assembled).
2 - Run on Gentoo (one 1TB and one 2TB)
2 - Run on Windows 10 (had no choice :-/)

Corsair Force MP600 M.2 2280 1TB and 2TB PCI-Express Gen 4.0 x4 NVMe

All boxes are running very well, and stable, no issue with drivers. You just need to enable some options in the kernel (I think, very simple).
Make sure your Motherboard and CPU is compatible with "PCI-Express Gen 4.0" or it makes not sense buying expensive NVME just to run Gen. 3

On 5/27/21 3:05 PM, 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)?
>
> * how long do they hold up (wear and tear)?
>
> * can I simply disable them if I run into problems?
>
> 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.

Checking out XPS8940 (about 1799.00CAD) it seems to me expensive. They did not mention if the NVME is Gen. 3 or Gen. 4

I paid about $1250CAD for:

- SilverStone Technology Plastic/Secc Mini-Itx Computer Case
- Corsair Force MP600 M.2 2280 1TB PCI-Express Gen 4.0
- CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200
- ASUS ROG STRIX Z590-I GAMING motherboard
- CORSAIR SF Series SF450 450 Watt 80 PLUS Gold
- Intel Core i5 11400 2.6GHz

On 2021-05-27, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 11:35:33PM +0200, Alarig Le Lay wrote
>
>> PS: I agree on the linux bloatiness, I have 4G of RAM on my personal
>> laptop and it begins to run out sometime???
>
> Showing my age... I started using linux on a spare machine with
> 16 ***MEGA***bytes of ram approx year 1999 or 2000, and the ram was
> perfectly sufficient.

I remember running Linux in 1993 on a '486 with 4MB of RAM. I felt
like I had the world on a string when I upgraded to 8MB.

--
Grant

On 2021-05-27, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:

> 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. The kernel has supported NVMe drives for ages (since kernel 3.3):

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/NVMe
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3397006/nvme-on-linux.html
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive/NVMe

I run Gentoo on a Thinkpad T580 with an NVMe drive, and it has always
worked flawlessly.

> * how long do they hold up (wear and tear)?

Don't know.

> * can I simply disable them if I run into problems?

Sure: you can disable support in the kernel if you want to, but I
can't think why you would. They "just work."

--
Grant

On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 06:11:51PM -0600, thelma@sys-concept.com wrote
> On 5/27/21 3:05 PM, 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)?
> >
> > * how long do they hold up (wear and tear)?
> >
> > * can I simply disable them if I run into problems?
> >
> > 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.
>
> Checking out XPS8940 (about 1799.00CAD) it seems to me expensive. They did not mention if the NVME is Gen. 3 or Gen. 4

I don't know what happened between last year and now, but Dell's
XPS8940's now all seem to come with NVME (expensive) and fancy-shmancy
Nvidia (i.e expensive) video. Also, reading the specs on the website
*V-E-R-R-R-R-Y* carefully, I see that the XPS machines come mostly with
*ONLY* 256 or 512 gig solid state drives; no SATA drive. On the other
hand a $600 CAD (on sale) Inspiron desktop with...

* 10th Gen Intel? Core# i5-10400 processor
* Intel? UHD Graphics 630 with shared graphics memory
* 12GB ram
* 1TB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA HDD

...looks very attractive. I'm not a gamer so supper speed isn't an
issue. I also vaguely remember years ago having to build in binary
modules into the kernel for Nvidia video. This meant I couldn't upgrade
to the latest kernel until Nvidia came out with the appropriate binary
video driver. Is that still a thing?

--
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

On 5/28/21 7:13 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 06:11:51PM -0600, thelma@sys-concept.com wrote
>> On 5/27/21 3:05 PM, 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)?
>>>
>>> * how long do they hold up (wear and tear)?
>>>
>>> * can I simply disable them if I run into problems?
>>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Checking out XPS8940 (about 1799.00CAD) it seems to me expensive. They did not mention if the NVME is Gen. 3 or Gen. 4
>
> I don't know what happened between last year and now, but Dell's
> XPS8940's now all seem to come with NVME (expensive) and fancy-shmancy
> Nvidia (i.e expensive) video. Also, reading the specs on the website
> *V-E-R-R-R-R-Y* carefully, I see that the XPS machines come mostly with
> *ONLY* 256 or 512 gig solid state drives; no SATA drive. On the other
> hand a $600 CAD (on sale) Inspiron desktop with...
>
> * 10th Gen Intel® Core# i5-10400 processor
> * Intel® UHD Graphics 630 with shared graphics memory
> * 12GB ram
> * 1TB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA HDD

Anything with spinning disk "is obsolete" they are trying to give it way because nobody is buying them (you can buy them for few dollars), don't expect it to last long.

On 5/28/21 8:16 AM, thelma@sys-concept.com wrote:
> On 5/28/21 7:13 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
>> On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 06:11:51PM -0600, thelma@sys-concept.com wrote
>>> On 5/27/21 3:05 PM, 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)?
>>>>
>>>> * how long do they hold up (wear and tear)?
>>>>
>>>> * can I simply disable them if I run into problems?
>>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> Checking out XPS8940 (about 1799.00CAD) it seems to me expensive. They did not mention if the NVME is Gen. 3 or Gen. 4
>>
>> I don't know what happened between last year and now, but Dell's
>> XPS8940's now all seem to come with NVME (expensive) and fancy-shmancy
>> Nvidia (i.e expensive) video. Also, reading the specs on the website
>> *V-E-R-R-R-R-Y* carefully, I see that the XPS machines come mostly with
>> *ONLY* 256 or 512 gig solid state drives; no SATA drive. On the other
>> hand a $600 CAD (on sale) Inspiron desktop with...
>>
>> * 10th Gen Intel® Core# i5-10400 processor
>> * Intel® UHD Graphics 630 with shared graphics memory
>> * 12GB ram
>> * 1TB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA HDD
>
> Anything with spinning disk "is obsolete" they are trying to give it way because nobody is buying them (you can buy them for few dollars), don't expect it to last long.

In a remote location I have ATOM-box 500GB SSD running asterisk, hylafax and is a backup unit; it is running 24/7 since 2014.
The only thing I changed few times is the External Power supply few times.

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 <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

> Anything with spinning disk "is obsolete" they are trying to give it
> way because nobody is buying them (you can buy them for few dollars),
> don't expect it to last long.

I've never had a hard drive fail on me. That includes a 2008 core2
duo that I shut down last autumn. Web surfing was getting painfully
slow, and really large spreadsheets were dying in 3 gigabytes of ram,
but otherwise it still worked. 256 G SSD is not enough for me now.
That takes us into 512 G SSD territory, which will be "adequate" for
now, but who knows about my future needs.

--
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 09:13:40AM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote

> I don't know what happened between last year and now, but Dell's
> XPS8940's now all seem to come with NVME (expensive) and fancy-shmancy
> Nvidia (i.e expensive) video. Also, reading the specs on the website
> *V-E-R-R-R-R-Y* carefully, I see that the XPS machines come mostly with
> *ONLY* 256 or 512 gig solid state drives; no SATA drive. On the other
> hand a $600 CAD (on sale) Inspiron desktop with...
>
> * 10th Gen Intel? Core# i5-10400 processor
> * Intel? UHD Graphics 630 with shared graphics memory
> * 12GB ram
> * 1TB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA HDD
>
> ...looks very attractive. I'm not a gamer so supper speed isn't an
> issue. I also vaguely remember years ago having to build in binary
> modules into the kernel for Nvidia video. This meant I couldn't upgrade
> to the latest kernel until Nvidia came out with the appropriate binary
> video driver. Is that still a thing?

Thanks for everybody's replies. While NVME seems to be OK (and fast),
the 512 G disk space limitation is a potential issue. How much do
1-terabyte SSD's cost? I've ordered the Inspiron above. At CAD $600+tax
how can you lose?

8 G ram on the older machine was more than enough, so 12 G should last
for a while. I'm looking at home use, email, large spreadsheets, some
convoluted bash scripting, web-surfing, and streaming including Netflix
(720p) and Youtube (1080p), etc. My next machine after this one will
probably have NVME, by which time the cost of a 1-terabyte SSD will have
hopefully come down to something reasonable.

--
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

On Thursday, May 27, 2021 11:35:33 PM CEST Alarig Le Lay wrote:
> On Thu 27 May 2021 17:05:07 GMT, Walter Dnes wrote:
> > * do NVMe drives function well under Gentoo (driver issues, etc)?
>
> I have a NVMe drive on my corporate laptop (a lenovo) and I don’t have
> any issue with it.
>
> PS: I agree on the linux bloatiness, I have 4G of RAM on my personal
> laptop and it begins to run out sometime…

Multiple machines with NVMe's, no issues.

Not all can boot from NVMe though, that's a BIOS-issue.

On 28/05/2021 17:17, Walter Dnes wrote:
>> Anything with spinning disk "is obsolete" they are trying to give it
>> way because nobody is buying them (you can buy them for few dollars),
>> don't expect it to last long.
>
> I've never had a hard drive fail on me. That includes a 2008 core2
> duo that I shut down last autumn. Web surfing was getting painfully
> slow, and really large spreadsheets were dying in 3 gigabytes of ram,
> but otherwise it still worked. 256 G SSD is not enough for me now.
> That takes us into 512 G SSD territory, which will be "adequate" for
> now, but who knows about my future needs.
>
I've recovered (or tried to) drives for other people, but again I've
been lucky in that I've never lost one of my own drives.

And as for nVME, some magazine did a "test to destruction" of
solid-state drives. They lasted almost for ever - I think the
computer(s) were configured to hammer the drives 24/7 and they lasted
over 18 months - that's probably a decade and more in normal usage.

The one thing to watch out for, is that if you DO encounter problems, DO
NOT shut the machine down. If a drive suffers failure, stage 1 seems to
be to go read-only. YOU MUST back it up immediately, because stage 2 is
to commit suicide on reboot. But you're highly unlikely to meet that
scenario in normal use.

I'm planning to buy one of those shingled horrors - a Seagate BaraCuda
12TB - for backups. Use btrfs or LVM, and rsync in-place copy. A good
idea in any case, but probably an even better idea if your main storage
is SSD.

Cheers,
Wol

On 3/6/21 4:52 am, antlists wrote:
> On 28/05/2021 17:17, Walter Dnes wrote:
>>> Anything with spinning disk "is obsolete" they are trying to give it
>>> way because nobody is buying them (you can buy them for few dollars),
>>> don't expect it to last long.
>>
>>    I've never had a hard drive fail on me.  That includes a 2008 core2
>> duo that I shut down last autumn.  Web surfing was getting painfully
>> slow, and really large spreadsheets were dying in 3 gigabytes of ram,
>> but otherwise it still worked.  256 G SSD is not enough for me now.
>> That takes us into 512 G SSD territory, which will be "adequate" for
>> now, but who knows about my future needs.
>>
> I've recovered (or tried to) drives for other people, but again I've
> been lucky in that I've never lost one of my own drives.
>
> ...
>
> I'm planning to buy one of those shingled horrors - a Seagate BaraCuda
> 12TB - for backups. Use btrfs or LVM, and rsync in-place copy. A good
> idea in any case, but probably an even better idea if your main
> storage is SSD.
>
> Cheers,
> Wol


Bounght a 4Tb usb3 backup drive that contains an SMR baracuda - took
quite a few days to transfer the 2Tb from its predecessor. Backup
(Borgbackup on btrfs) is quite fast with small changes between backup
sets - miserably slow otherwise.  I am still in two minds if SMR is
usable (i.e., will finish before the next run is due!) in my scenario.

BillK