Re: [gentoo-user] Qustions re Dell M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drives under Gentoo

[Walter Dnes]

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 09:13:40AM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote
 
>   I don't know what happened between last year and now, but Dell's
> XPS8940's now all seem to come with NVME (expensive) and fancy-shmancy
> Nvidia (i.e expensive) video.  Also, reading the specs on the website
> *V-E-R-R-R-R-Y* carefully, I see that the XPS machines come mostly with
> *ONLY* 256 or 512 gig solid state drives; no SATA drive.  On the other
> hand a $600 CAD (on sale) Inspiron desktop with...
>
> * 10th Gen Intel® Core# i5-10400 processor
> * Intel® UHD Graphics 630 with shared graphics memory
> * 12GB ram
> * 1TB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA HDD
>
> ...looks very attractive.  I'm not a gamer so supper speed isn't an
> issue.  I also vaguely remember years ago having to build in binary
> modules into the kernel for Nvidia video.  This meant I couldn't upgrade
> to the latest kernel until Nvidia came out with the appropriate binary
> video driver.  Is that still a thing?

  Thanks for everybody's replies.  While NVME seems to be OK (and fast),
the 512 G disk space limitation is a potential issue.  How much do
1-terabyte SSD's cost?  I've ordered the Inspiron above.  At CAD $600+tax
how can you lose?

  8 G ram on the older machine was more than enough, so 12 G should last
for a while.  I'm looking at home use, email, large spreadsheets, some
convoluted bash scripting, web-surfing, and streaming including Netflix
(720p) and Youtube (1080p), etc.  My next machine after this one will
probably have NVME, by which time the cost of a 1-terabyte SSD will have
hopefully come down to something reasonable.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications