Arch Linux

wilmerhenao

Member

From: Ann Arbor, MI

Registered: 2012-10-15

Posts: 38

Website

M.2 NVME Solid State Drive installation

Hi. I got this new fancy machine with 2 regular drives and this weird M.2 NVME drive that apparently uses this PCI bus that can read data in parallel.

First. It seems like the only way to see this drive on fdisk/parted is by changing the BIOS sata operation option from "raid On" to AHCI. Is this the right way to do it, or am I killing the performance somehow?. I just wanna make sure that I'm using the PCI Express or whatever it is that's fast. lol.

Second. Does anyone recommend a particular filesystem in there?. I'm guessing I need a / and a /boot partition. I guess the question is whether the filesystem approach should change at all with these drives.

Thanks!

Lone_Wolf

Member

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,919

Re: M.2 NVME Solid State Drive installation

firmware raid options for sata tend to give little benefit (look up fakeraid if you want to know more) and usually require proprietary drivers that are only available on windows OSes .

AHCI is preferred mode for sata on linux.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_state_drive
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/So … drive/NVMe

Incase you have a favorite filesystem, use it.
The kernel takes care of the low level differences between hdd & ssd and the amount of writes SSDs can handle without giving issues has increased a lot over the last decade.

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

Lizzi

Member

Registered: 2016-05-15

Posts: 40

Re: M.2 NVME Solid State Drive installation

I had that same concern as op and tried f2fs and brtfs but when my filesystem became corrupt i had nothing that could repair it.  There are tools for each but none of them worked for me.  Went back to ext4 and have no intention of trying anything else.  Other people seem to love f2fs and btrfs but i have yet to find the attraction.

Also congrats on your new machine.  nvme's are da bomb for speed!

Last edited by Lizzi (2020-05-26 13:22:42)

---

BTW, I also use arch, gentoo, artix & manjaro