Drive Configurations — M.2, SSD, HDD

[pastrychef]

Nothing stops you from booting your experimental operating systems from regular drives and just leaving the M.2 untouched.

I have OS X on my M.2. Two hot swap bays for 2.5" drives and three hot swap bays for 3.5" drives. I can boot from any of them.

 

[kiiroaka]

I have to ask, does your m.2 have the bootloader for all your disk drives? I presume that you installed it as UEFI. How did you format the other drives? UEFI? If so, did you add the other disks to the m.2 bootloader? When you delete a disk do you also go into the UEFI shell and delete them?

The last time I used caddies was over 3 decades ago. Now I find them to be an un-necessary expense. It's why I chose the case I did, the Antec 302. It makes installing and removing disk drives just slightly cumbersome (I have to open both the left and right case covers.)

 

[pastrychef]

Yes, the Clover boot loader is on my M.2. I had Windows installed as legacy and later converted it to UEFI. The only difference is that in legacy mode, if I wanted to boot in to Windows, I had to choose to boot from it in bios. In UEFI mode, I can use Clover to boot in to it. My Ubuntu install is on a separate drive that I don't normally keep in my system because I very seldomly use it.

You don't have to add drives to Clover. It will detect what can be booted from. I've never had to even launch the UEFI shell.

In the old days, hot swap bays required trays and, at times, caused some stability issues. Nowadays, the hot swap bays are tray-less and tool-less and really makes life much simpler when you want to swap out drives.

 

[Going Bald]

As a technician I am always installing new OSes, changing this, or changing that, trying this and that, upgrading this or downgrading that, etc.

If I had an m.2 SSD and I wanted to change the OS, I'd have to remove it and install a new one in it's place. For example, let's say that I want to audition Sierra, a different Linux distro (and I've tried a lot of them), W10, etc. In my case I disconnect the original drive, throw on a "new" drive, install the OS and play with it until I feel confident that everything works. The alternative would be to do an image backup (which should be done on a regular basis, anyway), blow away the OS with the new one, and copy over all the old files still on the image backup (Time Machine in the case of OSX) and if I didn't like it, for whatever reason, then I would need to blow it away and restore from the image.

Best to leave the M.2 alone and use a hot swap bay for all those other OS installations - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P2PNOOM/?tag=tonymacx86com-20
These come in various configurations and if you are always trying different "flavors" of Linux or other OSs than it makes more sense to throw in a new drive, install and test, then remove the extra drive. I have used these since they came out with them and broken the springs/worn out the doors on two of them using them too much.

 

[kiiroaka]

Thanks Pastry Chef and Going Bald.

I've decided to leave well enough alone. Having already installed Windows 8.1Pro (and Linux Mint MATE 17.3) in Legacy, I was thinking of converting Win8.1P to UEFI before I updated to Windows 10. I had already made an image backup and a Recovery USB, but the steps necessary within El Cap for my ASRock board and Mint Linux 18 having problems with the same board has convinced me to not upset the apple cart ("If it's not broke, don't fix it!"). I shall leave playing with UEFI to work machines.

As far as Windows 10 goes, turning off Telemetry seems like a temporary fix as Microsoft seems intent on collecting user data regardless of the user's wishes to not be tracked, indexed, filed, stapled, etc. ("The Prisoner" TV series.) I still have a few days to decide if I want to upgrade to W10, and it was that indecision that was driving my desire to switch to all UEFI.

https://fix10.isleaked.com/
http://arstechnica.com/information-...-much-privacy-by-default-heres-how-to-fix-it/

It'll be interesting to see what MS does in the EU now that it is being sued to preserve privacy in EU nations. Ubuntu did the same thing and all it did was to drive users away to Mint Linux, Trails, and other more secure Linux distros. Like others, I'll probably just use Windows to play games and run apps. and utilities that only run under Windows. But using the MS browser to surf the 'Net is out of the question, or any browser running with W10, for that matter. Another concern looming on the horizon is Opera, now that the Chinese have bought it.

 

[pastrychef]

There's an app called WinClone that can convert a Legacy install of Windows to EFI with one click. I used this to convert my Bootcamp drive. Then I transplanted it from my Mac Pro to my hackintosh and then re-installed Windows 10 on top of it.

 

[Going Bald]

Thanks Pastry Chef and Going Bald.

I've decided to leave well enough alone. Having already installed Windows 8.1Pro (and Linux Mint MATE 17.3) in Legacy, I was thinking of converting Win8.1P to UEFI before I updated to Windows 10. I had already made an image backup and a Recovery USB, but the steps necessary within El Cap for my ASRock board and Mint Linux 18 having problems with the same board has convinced me to not upset the apple cart ("If it's not broke, don't fix it!"). I shall leave playing with UEFI to work machines.

As far as Windows 10 goes, turning off Telemetry seems like a temporary fix as Microsoft seems intent on collecting user data regardless of the user's wishes to not be tracked, indexed, filed, stapled, etc. ("The Prisoner" TV series.) I still have a few days to decide if I want to upgrade to W10, and it was that indecision that was driving my desire to switch to all UEFI.

https://fix10.isleaked.com/
http://arstechnica.com/information-...-much-privacy-by-default-heres-how-to-fix-it/

It'll be interesting to see what MS does in the EU now that it is being sued to preserve privacy in EU nations. Ubuntu did the same thing and all it did was to drive users away to Mint Linux, Trails, and other more secure Linux distros. Like others, I'll probably just use Windows to play games and run apps. and utilities that only run under Windows. But using the MS browser to surf the 'Net is out of the question, or any browser running with W10, for that matter. Another concern looming on the horizon is Opera, now that the Chinese have bought it.

Win10 is strictly business $$ making machine. It only goes on-line to talk to client site/download/upload files.
I have other builds to play on the internet and experiment with - mainly previous work builds that I "upgraded" by assembling all new components or builds I did for friends and family that for one reason or another came back to me.

As for the privacy thing with Win10 - do you have an iPhone or other "smart" phone? Did you dumb it down, turning off all of its communications functions except for the phone call/receive functions? If you did not, your "privacy" is invaded more than MS ever has with Win10. As long as you carry that phone, whether off or on (unless you remove the battery) they can tell where you are, where you have been, and list any calls you made and who you talked to. When you went online, every site you visited and every keystroke you texted is a matter of record the governments of the world can gain access to with a court order in most countries and not even needing that in some. And Apple found out their encryption was not worth much recently when someone cracked their codes and turned over a persons information to the government. There are no electronic communications systems today that are not vulnerable in some way or another to intrusion if they connect to the WWW or mobile phone system or to any system that connects to the WWW or mobile phone system.

 

[kiiroaka]

I still have a land line. Only. Yes, browser trackers are everyday occurrences but that doesn't mean that one should sheepishly accept it. There's a reason why people install ad blockers in their browsers, and when I receive a cookie notice in Opera I will copy the URL, open Firefox, paste it, read what I need to know and close it. But the idea of MS or Ubuntu knowing what movies I've watched, what music I've listened to, what eBooks I've read, what ads I have clicked on, what maps I've looked at, what store ads I've looked at, what articles I've purchased, ... every single site I've clicked on, ... is offensive, to me. Heck, there was a time when I would only purchase something over the Internet after booting up on a Linux LiveCD; shutdown the PC and all traces are gone. It used to be that we would only worry about our own PCs, now we also have to worry about the end server being hacked.

[edit]
It looks like I was mistaken, Linux Mint 18.0 is having problems with ASRock Skylake boards:

Freezes/Crashes with ASRock Skylake motherboards
A known issue is affecting ASRock Skylake motherboards. The kernel floods /var/log/syslog with messages until the disk runs out of space.

If you are suffering from this issue add "echo 'disable' > /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/gpe6F" into your /etc/rc.local (to edit this file with admin privileges, you can type "gksu xed /etc/rc.local").

https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_sarah_cinnamon.php

 

[illologist]

Thanks for all the useful feedback, everybody. M.2 drive's are tempting, but I think I'm going to go with a fast 1TB SSD for capacity & cost reasons.

 

[kiiroaka]

Well, yesterday I upgraded my Win8.1P to W10P and wouldn't you know it?, it munged my Linux Mint on my second drive. I had to re-install Grub2. As usual it was a p.i.t.a.

But before I did that I disconnected my two Linux drives, installed a fresh drive and Installed Mint MATE 18.0. The few hours I spent with it discouraged me (wouldn't install Opera, Brasero wouldn't burn images, wouldn't install my window borders and controls, wouldn't recognize my USB drives, wouldn't mount my external backup drive.) I wiped it and installed Mint MATE 17.3 on it. After installing all my eye goodies (window borders, controls, icons, mouse pointers (why doesn't OSX allow red mouse pointers and enlarging of the pointer or reversing the colour?)) I shutdown the system, removed the new drive and re-connected my old Linux drives, and after re-installing Grub am backing up everything (bookmarks are all important) so that I can restore to the new drive. I will then use one drive for Linux Time Shift (works like Time Machine) and will use the other Linux drive for OSX Time Machine.

I can see where my having OSX El Cap on an m.2 SATA drive could have caused me problems. As it is I never will because it hangs off the ASMedia controller and Mint 18.0 had a hard time with it, not finding drivers, video garbage on boot-up and shutdown, causing reboots when powering down, etc. Windows 10P also did something to the OSX drive, installing another folder with a boot file. Luckily my OSX drive boots fine.

Unless that m.2 SATA drive, with OSX El Cap on it, can be disabled in the BIOS or UEFI, it would probably necessitate removing it - just to be on the safe side. I know that if Linux was installed on it that I would have had to re-install Grub.

And yes, I did play with UEFI when installing Mint MATE 18.0. Luckily it complained that NVRAM had entries for other OSes, even though my Win and OSX drives were disconnected. Since I haven't imaged W10P there's no way I am installing Linux in UEFI at the present time.

I am so glad that I bought the Antec 302 case; it makes swapping drives easy. And yes, all my SATA cables are numbered so that I don't make any mistakes when re-connecting them.