What hardware are you using?

[crosscourt]

Two of my Dell Latitude 3340s seem to be having problems and its not worth fixing them. Just picked up another Dell Latitude 7370 that should be here next week.

[crosscourt]

Cloned my wifes install on here 7370 over to a 256gb NVMe to use on my 7370. Should be large enough as Ill be using a 256gb sd card for additional storage. Havent decided whether Ill go to 16gb of ram. Depends on whether the 8gb the 7370 has is one or two sticks. Also picked up a power brick but waiting to see what condition of the battery is. They listed it as fair based on the bios but sometimes you find they arent as good as stated.

[crosscourt]

Just picked up two Netac 256gb ssds that are Chinese made. I initially had some issues when trying to clone Win10 to one of them, but did a test install of Q4OS on the same drive and had no issues.

[tlmiller]

I've had several Netac drives in the past. They originally were REALLY iffy quality, but they've improved (mostly) in the last few years. While the performance of most of their stuff is still only ok performance (they only have 1 model NVMe that has >3000 Mbps rated), it's quite decently made and good priced. I think one of my smaller external enclosures actually still has a Netac 256 m.2 SATA in it.

[crosscourt]

$25 a piece for the drives so it got my attention. Wanted to give it a try and see how they do. Adata is presently the cheapest $32-34 for 256gb. Im not that far away from not using 2.5 drives anymore. As I get rid of older hardware the next few years Ill be down to M.2 sata/NVMe drives. My Ryzen system presently has a 2.5 sata 2tb drive but Ill probably convert to NVMe and keep that one as the backup.

[crosscourt]

My wife took a liking to my Chromebox and has been using it both for personal and entertainment purposes. I ended up buying another one for my room to use as an entertainment center.

[tlmiller]

I'm trying to stop myself buying a 2TB NVMe drive. I'm looking at maybe buying that for my T14G2 since it can't use the WWAN port for a second drive, then take the 1TB that's in there and put it in a m.2 NVMe to PCIe 4x adapter and put that in my desktop in my spare x16 slot and move /var and /home to it, thus freeing up more room there as well.

[crosscourt]

I was tempted to buy a 2tb NVMe drive for my Ryzen system and use the SATA ssd as my backup, but decided not to. The SATA ssd drive works very well and Im pleased with the speed. $170 for me just seems unnecessary but maybe down the road.

[tlmiller]

I want one since with my emulators installed, and my Steam games installed, a 1TB drive is >50% full. That's not a problem when I can put a 512GB drive in teh WWAN slot (T14Gen1, T495), but it's not leaving an AWFUL lot of comfort room before performance drop-off on a 1TB without additional drives. And then the machines that aren't powerful enough to game on (Latitude 7400, GemiBook Pro) who cares, as a 1TB is SIGNIFICANTLY more than I need, since my installs without emulators or Steam games is like 15GB.

Ultimately I failed. I ordered a Verbatim Vi3000 NVMe (3100/2900 rated PCIe 3.0x4) 2TB drive and a cheap NVMe m.2 to PCIe adapter for the desktop. Should be here in about a week. So that laptop will get upgraded, the 7415 I just won't do Emulators on for now. The neat thing on the desktop is I'll have 250GB for /var, 750GB for /home, a full 1TB for the rest of /, AND a full 1TB for Windows. So very spacious. Still have a m.2 SATA slot free on the board and an unused 512GB m.2 SATA drive, so might just throw that in there too...don't know what I'd use it for, but hey...

[tlmiller]

Decided to do the m.2 SATA drive. Oddly, the m.2 slot is M-key'd only (which usually is NVMe when not B+M), but it is SATA only. Tried a m.2 NVMe in there and it absolutely did not recognize, but the 512GB SATA had no issues. Whatever, it's not an overly important drive. So, After the 2TB arrives so I can steal the 1TB from my laptop to put in here, it'll have a fair amount of storage:

1TB NVMe for /home (plenty of room for emulators and Steam games) (this is the only part that's not done)
512 GB SATA for /var (for my VM's)
1TB NVMe for the rest of /
960GB SATA for Windows.