New NVMe Drive

[ProfessorTomoe 1,336]

A new system drive for my Sager notebook is on its way, and will be here sometime during the day today. It's a TEAMGROUP MP44 PCI-E 4.0 4TB NVMe drive, ordered from Amazon for $253.29 including tax. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to its arrival with more than a bit of anticipation, and with just a touch of trepidation. The trepidation is due to the fact that the MP44 is a PCI-E 4.0 drive, while the interface on the Sager laptop runs at only PCI-E 3.0 speeds.

I take some comfort in the knowledge that PCI-E 4.0 is backwards compatible with 3.0, and with knowing that some Facebook friends have done this same upgrade successfully. Still, I'm a bit on edge because of the ever-so-slight probability that the upgrade may fail. There's not much I can do to prevent it - it'll either work, or it won't. So, I'm going to back up the old Samsung 970 EVO 1TB with a disk cloning utility (R-Drive Image is my poison of choice), get a spot on my kitchen table cleared of laundry and cat food, haul my son out of his reverie in his room, and get started on the upgrade.

I think I should probably take a Lorazepam or two before I start.

[mlooney 3,594]

Good luck on your upgrade.  My mind still boggles at the idea of multiple terabytes drives being sub 500

[Don Edwards 561]

Yeah, it's kind of astonishing. Particularly to those of use who have paid well over $100 per megabyte.

(My first home hard drive was 40 megabytes and, if I recall correctly, cost about $800. Oh, and I had to split it into two partitions because the OS couldn't handle a partition that big. The computer I bought earlier this month has 40 gigabytes of RAM, and cost just under $800.)

[ijuin 594]

Oh yeah, I remember that the FAT-12 file system couldn’t comprehend volumes larger than 32MB (i.e. a 16-bit count of 512-byte sectors). My family’s first computer with a hard disk was a 286 with a whopping eighty megabytes, which had to be partitioned into three volumes. (This was in 1987.)

[ProfessorTomoe 1,336]

Alas, I was thwarted. For want of a screw, the terabytes were lost.

Two things. First, we couldn't do a swap-out of the boot drive because the screw holding it in was stripped. Second, it turned out that there were slots for two more drives, but there were no retention screws for them in the case, and the drive itself didn't come with one. No way to install it. Augh.

I've written to Sager tech support and asked for help. Let's see what happens Monday.

[mlooney 3,594]

Bummer

[Darth Fluffy 338]

17 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

Yeah, it's kind of astonishing. Particularly to those of use who have paid well over $100 per megabyte.

(My first home hard drive was 40 megabytes and, if I recall correctly, cost about $800. Oh, and I had to split it into two partitions because the OS couldn't handle a partition that big. The computer I bought earlier this month has 40 gigabytes of RAM, and cost just under $800.)

I'm with you. I bumped a 20 MB up to 30 MB for some hundreds of $, then had to make it two separate drives. Weird thing was, it was my first DOS computer, and CPM-80 would have handled it if it was a Z80 computer. Like you, it was my first hard drive.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,336]

My first hard drive was almost a 44MB MFM hard drive. Problem was, I'd specifically ordered a 40MB IDE drive (IDE drives were still new) to go with my 80286-12 system. I made the builder take the system back, pull the drive/controller, and put in what I'd ordered. I did finally get my spiffy Seagate 40MB IDE drive, complete with paddle card controller, which I was glad to have, even if it meant having 4 fewer megabytes. I was happy with the increased reliability.

[mlooney 3,594]

I remember when hard drives varied in reliability, and there were utilities to scan the drive.  Not to mention defragmening the drive!

[Don Edwards 561]

3 hours ago, mlooney said:

I remember when hard drives varied in reliability, and there were utilities to scan the drive.  Not to mention defragmening the drive!

The latter is a function of the filesystem, not the drive itself. To this day, Windows's NTFS driver automatically runs a defragment-and-repair process in the background. Dis-recommended for Linux because (a) those processes are actually needed and (b) the Linux NTFS driver doesn't have them.

As well as (c) defragmenting by definition involves a LOT of writing to disk, which is bad for SSDs and thumb drives.

Linux's filesystems don't need defragmenting. Their space-allocation algorithm is smarter than the defragmenter, and leaves files with room to grow. Defragmenting would be particularly pointless on BTRFS, and any other filesystem that does copy-on-write to prevent corruption.

(It also doesn't hurt that our multi-terabyte SSDs are much larger and much faster than our 40-megabyte hard drives.)

[mlooney 3,594]

It was a different time.  In those day's Norton was a well respected software house.  That was before Peter sold it. Norton Utilities and Norton Commander were a great set of Utilities.  Norton Commander lives on today on Unix and Unix like systems as Midnight Commander (mc vs nc)  I use mc daily.  I also used the hell out of Norton's Editor for programming.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,336]

Update: Sager sent me the screws. They're on their way and due to arrive on Thursday. My Amazon screws are already here, but pedant that my son is for OEM equipment, he refuses to use them until we've tried the Sager screws first. Bah. Humbug.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,336]

The NVMe saga has apparently come to a happy conclusion. The screws arrived today, and they were indeed different from the ones I got from Amazon. My son installed the 4TB NVMe drive using them, and we then took a few moments to do a slight bit of case dusting before reassembling the laptop. A few hushed prayers and crossed fingers later, we booted up the system, ran Disk Management to set up the drive, and voila! The drive worked.

For anyone interested, it is indeed running at PCI-E 3.0 speeds, according to the Crystal Disk Info/Benchmark suite. It reads a tad slower than my Samsung C: drive, but writes just a bit faster. Crystal reports it's built to the NVMe 2.0 standard, whereas the Samsung 970 EVO is merely NVMe 1.3 compliant. Go figure. It's also running cooler than the Samsung, probably due to the graphene heatsink ribbon on top of it.

Regardless of the differences, at the moment, I'm happy.

[Darth Fluffy 338]

Curious on thoughts about rotary hard drives still being relevant.

[ijuin 594]

Rotary drives still have a lower price per terabyte and are available in larger capacities than flash-based drives, but that may reverse by 2030 if there are no new breakthroughs in rotary drive technology.

[mlooney 3,594]

Spinning rust is much more unstable than solid state, one reason I avoid it when every possible.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,336]

9 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Curious on thoughts about rotary hard drives still being relevant.

Spinning rust is decent for backups. As already mentioned here, you can get huge capacities at affordable prices. These can be pressed into service as external drives and used to store backup data, preferably drive images. I've seen 22TB drives for just over $329, enclosures not included.

[mlooney 3,594]

22 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Spinning rust is decent for backups. As already mentioned here, you can get huge capacities at affordable prices. These can be pressed into service as external drives and used to store backup data, preferably drive images. I've seen 22TB drives for just over $329, enclosures not included.

if I had a need for that level backup that would be good.  However JPEG, PNG, texted based PDF, and text files don't really use that much space.  I've got a 2TB drive and 3TB Could storage and neither is anywhere near full.