Can I use a NVME SSD ?

I am grateful to all who contributed here.

@stan especially got the "thinking juices running" ......I have 25 tabs open as a result of reading his blurb up above !
 


@stan especially got the "thinking juices running" ......I have 25 tabs open as a result of reading his blurb up above !
It's good for you! We'll both learn a little from the experience. ;)

But my education didn't cost me any money! :p
 
Your picture, and Brian's picture too, both show that there is no socket there to receive the SSD. Those are empty solder pads... where the socket would be on the Pro4/Hyper model. You can see circuit traces between the rows of pads on Brian's pic (and your other pics in posts #20 and #24)... those would be hidden if the plastic housing of the M2 connector was present.
Shite, I didn't notice! When I edited it (GIMP opens scaled by default). Sorry all. This is why I miss gold and green boards w/o coating... and why I should actually trust the manual... and why I should look more carefully.
:embarrassed:

Edit: Aaaargh, can see them clear as day now! I have a low-brightness power saver on my phone which is where I first saw it. But no excuse for my PC screen. Assumption is the mother of all fckups I guess.
 
Last edited:
No problem, mate!

I can't tell you how many times I get mixed up... but my wife can (she keeps a list). ;)
 
We all screw up from time to time.....even me !
 
FROM ASRock Technical Support


Hi Brian,

Thank you for choosing ASRock and contacting us.

PCIe2 is a PCIe x 1 slot and it doesn't fit with your M.2 SSD
1 asrock.png





To install the M.2 SSD on B150M Pro4, please use a PCIe to M.2 adapter and install it on PCIE1 or PCIe4 slot.


2 asrock.png















Thank you,
Sincerely,
ASRock TSD

寄件者: [email protected] <[email protected]>
寄件日期: 2021年10月4日 上午 08:22:27
收件者: Asrock TSD
主旨:#B150M Pro4# Which slot to fit a NVME in (Australia)

»Contact Information
Name:​
Brian Hand
E-Mail:​
condobloke
Language:​
Others
Country:​
Australia
Phone:​
»Product Information
Problem Type:​
HDD
Model Name:​
B150M Pro4
BIOS Version:​
2.8
Purchase Date:​
7 Oct, 2015 ?
Serial Number:​
M80-61002100
»Configuration
CPU:​
Memory:​
Video Card:​
,
HDD:​
ssd,Others
ODD:​
,
OS:​
Linux Mint 20.2
Other Devices:​
»Subject
Which slot to fit a NVME in
»Problem Description
I wish to fit a nvme drive
1. The specs tell me that - 2 x PCI Express 3.0 x16 Slots (PCIE1: x16 mode; PCIE4: x4 mode)*
and:*Supports NVMe SSD as boot disks

To use the PCIE1 slot I would use an adapter to fit the nvme card.
Correct?

2. I am told that the PCIE2 slot is a M.2 slot ...and that the nvme card will plug straight into this slot
Correct?

Which of the two scenarios is correct?
 
Brian, I think a problem with your thread was that for a period of time you were....

...wait for it


under-stanned?

Wiz
 
YES !!!!!
 
There bloody well should be

It would be well utilised !
 
I thought I might give some feedback here (groan button sounds automatically)

The ezdiy adapter turned out to be not so good. Lacked any discernible quality. Did not hold the nvme card at all well. So I ditched it for this:https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B084GDY2PW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

That turned out to be quite well built.
fitted the nvme and installed it to PCIE1

Established partitions...as per pic...
NVME via GParted.png


Fired up Timeshift on a live LM20.2 usb stick....and restored a snapshot to the nvme.
Rebooted and there it was. !

I have two concerns/questions

1. @Alexzee ....I noted on your pic HERE that your partitioning states "Master Boot record".....what does that mean?.....does it mean that you have installed on a boot partition which you made and the partition is in fact all master boot record?...approx 245gb ?........and you have also carved off a smallish piece at the end of the drive for a swap partition (5gb)?

So when it has come to install, you have chosen "something else" and pointed the install to that MB partition?..So the /home is also on that partition?

2. I am under impressed with the speed. I am not just having a whinge. It is quicker than the120gb ssd which it replaced (I still have the 120gb ssd plugged in btw).....but it does not make me sit up and pay attention and perhaps say WOW !
The pc is still taking more than 30 - 35 seconds to boot which is just slightly quicker than the 120 ssd.
 
I am under impressed with the speed.

It's insane. The writing process to install Lubuntu on an NVMe system was under 5 minutes - it was a bit over 3 minutes. I didn't believe it. I did it a second time to undo the secure boot, and it did it just as quickly - while I paid attention to the time.

I used to use computers hatefully. I despised working with a computer because of the speed. It was horrible.

Today, finally, computers are fast enough. I hated them right up until about the 1.4 GHz range. Then they kinda got fast enough. So, for the majority of my computing life, I've pretty much hated them. When we got into the 1.2/1.4 GHz range is when they were mostly fast enough for me (with contemporary software).

So many people say, "Oh, I loved computing from an early age, as soon as I used one!"

Not me...

The damned thing was slow, useless, and complicated. To make the computer do anything useful required skill and writing your own software! Old computers were rubbish.

The speed of NVMe drives is absolutely amazing. To think, devices will continue to increase in speed. The speed jump from NVMe was like the speed jump from HDD to SSD, only maybe slightly more pronounced.
 
I scrubbed the partitions, and reinstalled using the Default install.
This allows the Linux installer to set partitions etc as it sees fit.
The result of that is :

nvme default install.png


The result of this is much increased Speed.
WOW !

So it is installed and working a treat!

Its only drawback is the boot time.

40 seconds. No real difference from the old ssd.

At the moment the 40 seconds is not going to worry me greatly....I have other things to worry about.

Eventually, it will bug me ! And I will set about trying to discover what the cause is. Bios?....dunno.

I am toying with the idea of moving the /home folder to the old 120GB SSD.....simply to make the installation of the next Linux Mint a simple exercise.
 
At the moment the 40 seconds is not going to worry me greatly...

Hmm... On my not-the-greatest laptop with an NVMe drive:

Code:
systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 3.144s (kernel) + 6.230s (userspace) = 9.374s 
graphical.target reached after 5.650s in userspace
 
I thought I might give some feedback here (groan button sounds automatically)

The ezdiy adapter turned out to be not so good. Lacked any discernible quality. Did not hold the nvme card at all well. So I ditched it for this:https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B084GDY2PW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

That turned out to be quite well built.
fitted the nvme and installed it to PCIE1

Established partitions...as per pic...View attachment 10575

Fired up Timeshift on a live LM20.2 usb stick....and restored a snapshot to the nvme.
Rebooted and there it was. !

I have two concerns/questions

1. @Alexzee ....I noted on your pic HERE that your partitioning states "Master Boot record".....what does that mean?.....does it mean that you have installed on a boot partition which you made and the partition is in fact all master boot record?...approx 245gb ?........and you have also carved off a smallish piece at the end of the drive for a swap partition (5gb)?

So when it has come to install, you have chosen "something else" and pointed the install to that MB partition?..So the /home is also on that partition?

2. I am under impressed with the speed. I am not just having a whinge. It is quicker than the120gb ssd which it replaced (I still have the 120gb ssd plugged in btw).....but it does not make me sit up and pay attention and perhaps say WOW !
The pc is still taking more than 30 - 35 seconds to boot which is just slightly quicker than the 120 ssd.
You're probably under-impressed coz there are more factors at play. Your motherboard may not have the bandwidth for gen 4 of PCIe (and that's where you start to feel it) for example. Another could be RAM speed. Another could be Single Thread Ranking of your CPU. But it's not all hardware. The first PC I used TinyCore Linux on was a 2007ish laptop and I was averaging boots of under 10 seconds, even hitting the golden 5 second boot which gets your name in the hall of fame. Bottom line: Don't expect miracles from a "complete" modern OS (explaining "complete", I don't count Arch, for example, as an OS or "complete" since it's more a foundation, just as a base-only Debian install -- i.e. the OS must be fully integrated etc. like a *buntu for example). Modern "complete" OSes run tons of services at startup. It's the nature of the beast. Now tasks like installing an OS, copying large files, and most operations using storage is where you feel the difference. You want a fast boot, try Void Linux,

Re your question to Alexzee, he can fill you in on the finer details when he's next around, but for the meantime, essentially:
He didn't install it on the boot partition, the whole partition boots, though. This is because the MBR holds the partition info and executable/bootloader (GRUB). It's retro, what I grew up with, and has many limits, the main two being disk size (2TB IIRC, maybe it was 4TB) and maximum partitions being 4 primary (1 could contain 4 or 5 logical partitions) ones. However, Alexzee has been pretty smart. See MBR is faster for this use and since his NVMe has 2 partitions and is nowhere near the size limit. The 5GB swap was probably just a nice round number, lol.
 
@Fanboi ....I will read that shortly.



@KGIII

I just rebooted in order to actually time it from hitting reboot to having a full screen ready to roll

45 seconds

Running systemd-analyze

brian@brian-desktop:~$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 8.322s (kernel) + 1min 30.322s (userspace) = 1min 38.644s
graphical.target reached after 9.774s in userspace
brian@brian-desktop:~$
 
You can likely speed that startup up quite a bit, by getting rid of services that don't need to run or at least don't need to run at system startup. Using blame will shed some light on it.

Code:
systemd-analyze blame

Then again, I find startup time to be pretty unimportant. My static devices never shut down for long and my mobile devices are all pretty speedy so spending 30 minutes to shave off 3 seconds isn't going to be how I spend my time.

I do plan on an article telling other people how to do so, however! So, there's that!
 
It's insane. The writing process to install Lubuntu on an NVMe system was under 5 minutes - it was a bit over 3 minutes. I didn't believe it. I did it a second time to undo the secure boot, and it did it just as quickly - while I paid attention to the time.

I used to use computers hatefully. I despised working with a computer because of the speed. It was horrible.

Today, finally, computers are fast enough. I hated them right up until about the 1.4 GHz range. Then they kinda got fast enough. So, for the majority of my computing life, I've pretty much hated them. When we got into the 1.2/1.4 GHz range is when they were mostly fast enough for me (with contemporary software).

So many people say, "Oh, I loved computing from an early age, as soon as I used one!"

Not me...

The damned thing was slow, useless, and complicated. To make the computer do anything useful required skill and writing your own software! Old computers were rubbish.

The speed of NVMe drives is absolutely amazing. To think, devices will continue to increase in speed. The speed jump from NVMe was like the speed jump from HDD to SSD, only maybe slightly more pronounced.
Although I really did "loved computing from an early age", I do think it's finally software catching up to hardware. I remember a time not too long ago when 2.4GHz (eg: Pentium 4's) was this mark we couldn't get past without OC'ing. I never felt frustrated by speed until software got bloated and hardware struggled. Now it's a situation of software trying to fully utilise what hardware offers, and by the time it does, we've come long enough that a small upgrade here and there keeps everything responsive.
 
I thought I might give some feedback here (groan button sounds automatically)

The ezdiy adapter turned out to be not so good. Lacked any discernible quality. Did not hold the nvme card at all well. So I ditched it for this:https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B084GDY2PW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

That turned out to be quite well built.
fitted the nvme and installed it to PCIE1

Established partitions...as per pic...View attachment 10575

Fired up Timeshift on a live LM20.2 usb stick....and restored a snapshot to the nvme.
Rebooted and there it was. !

I have two concerns/questions

1. @Alexzee ....I noted on your pic HERE that your partitioning states "Master Boot record".....what does that mean?.....does it mean that you have installed on a boot partition which you made and the partition is in fact all master boot record?...approx 245gb ?........and you have also carved off a smallish piece at the end of the drive for a swap partition (5gb)?

So when it has come to install, you have chosen "something else" and pointed the install to that MB partition?..So the /home is also on that partition?

2. I am under impressed with the speed. I am not just having a whinge. It is quicker than the120gb ssd which it replaced (I still have the 120gb ssd plugged in btw).....but it does not make me sit up and pay attention and perhaps say WOW !
The pc is still taking more than 30 - 35 seconds to boot which is just slightly quicker than the 120 ssd.
I installed Debian to the Master Boot Record of the Nvme drive.

Yes, the /home is also on that partition.
Screenshot from 2021-11-01 07-49-26.png
 
Been running Fedora this way for about 3 years now.

df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 16G 0 16G 0% /dev
tmpfs 16G 33M 16G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 6.3G 2.0M 6.3G 1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p4 1.9T 151G 1.7T 9% /
tmpfs 16G 32K 16G 1% /tmp
/dev/nvme0n1p4 1.9T 151G 1.7T 9% /home
/dev/nvme0n1p4 1.9T 151G 1.7T 9% /opt
/dev/nvme0n1p4 1.9T 151G 1.7T 9% /var
/dev/nvme0n1p2 2.5G 287M 2.3G 12% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p1 190M 6.1M 184M 4% /boot/efi
tmpfs 3.2G 7.7M 3.2G 1% /run/user/1000
 

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