Question M2 & SATA3 drive priorities?

[mikey100tv]

Afternoon, guys.

One of my very occasional visits here, but I straightaway thought of you guys as probably being the best bunch to answer this. It's yet another M2 query, but I don't see this being discussed elsewhere ATM.

Now; I bought myself a new HP Pavilion desktop rig back around the start of the pandemic. It's been fairly well upgraded; 4GB DDR4 -> 32GB, the original 1 TB Toshie plate-spinner has been replaced by a 1 TB Crucial MX500, plus I've added-in the drive from what was originally an 'external' storage drive (a 3TB Seagate Desktop 'Expansion' unit), so I now have an internal 3TB Barracuda secondary 'data' drive.

Reading through the specs last night, I discover - much to my surprise - that this thing actually has a single M2 2280 slot somewhere in there, too. Never noticed it, the few times I've been inside the tower doing stuff - admittedly, I wasn't looking for it - but I'm now considering adding an M2 drive to the mix. So; here's my question:-

IF you add an M2 drive to an existing set-up that already has a SATA3 SSD set as the primary drive, does the BIOS decide to 're-set' the new M2 as the primary drive? I know everybody these days seems to want everything to be as fast as possible, but I don't fall into that category. I'm not a Windows user - haven't run the beast for at least a decade - I'm a Linux geek, specifically 'Puppy' Linux, which loads into RAM from read-only squash file-system packages and runs from there........and the existing MX500 is plenty fast enough for me already. 'Puppy' is up-and-running, at desktop, in around 15 seconds; I'm more than satisfied with that, though I may transfer all the secondary drive's existing data to an M2 if this works as I hope it will.

Just curious, really. I'm only at the early, "considering it" stage right now, but it never hurts to do your research.....and NVME is kinda 'new' territory for me.

TIA, people.


Mike. 😉

 

[rgd1101]

exact model of this hp?
the m.2 slot might be sata type only

 

[SkyNetRising]

IF you add an M2 drive to an existing set-up that already has a SATA3 SSD set as the primary drive, does the BIOS decide to 're-set' the new M2 as the primary drive?

After adding another drive (any drive, doesn't matter, if it is SATA or NVME) , boot priority in BIOS can change.
You have to check it and verify, if boot priority settings are correct.

 

[mikey100tv]

Thanks for the replies, guys. My bad; this is an HP Pavilion 590-p0024na.......and, like I said, this is somewhat virgin territory for me. I know most of you are used to doing stuff in Windows, but as far as I'm aware the Linux kernel handles these quite well.

After adding another drive (any drive, doesn't matter, if it is SATA or NVME) , boot priority in BIOS can change.
You have to check it and verify, if boot priority settings are correct.

Fair comment. As I said earlier, this is just research, for now......but every wee nugget of info helps.


Mike. 😉

 

[Misgar]

Assuming you can add an M.2 NVMe drive without losing any SATA ports (some motherboards share CPU lanes so you can have 2 SATA ports or one NVMe drive), then filling the 2280 slot will simply give you another drive. What you do with it is up to you.

You could clone your existing Puppy Linux SATA drive over to the NVMe drive and shave a few seconds off boot times. Alternatively, you can use the new NVMe drive as fast storage.

Provided you check the boot options after installing the NVMe drive and ensure they still point to the Linux boot drive, you shouldn't have any problems.

 

[mikey100tv]

Assuming you can add an M.2 NVMe drive without losing any SATA ports (some motherboards share CPU lanes so you can have 2 SATA ports or one NVMe drive), then filling the 2280 slot will simply give you another drive. What you do with it is up to you.

You could clone your existing Puppy Linux SATA drive over to the NVMe drive and shave a few seconds off boot times. Alternatively, you can use the new NVMe drive as fast storage.

Provided you check the boot options after installing the NVMe drive and ensure they still point to the Linux boot drive, you shouldn't have any problems.

Mm. Yah; fast storage is what I'm aiming for.......the 3TB Barracuda is a relatively slow drive; this is only a 5400 RPM spindle speed here. I develop a lot of items for the Puppy community, and the secondary data drive is where I keep most of this stuff. Access times have never been quite as sprightly as I would like them to be!

I know there's 3 SATA ports on this board; the 'mid-tower' Pavilions tend to all use custom HP boards.....non-standard dimensions, custom connectors, and a weird slim-line PSU that's almost impossible to upgrade. The primary drive uses one, the secondary drive another, and the 3rd is occupied by the built-in DVD combo drive (I wanted one of these because I often still boot 'Live' Pups off an optical disc.....and if I wanted to, I could even save back to that disc; a special 'Puppy' trick that's existed since day one, more than 20 years ago). It DOES have its uses, still.

Right. Sounds promising, so I'll continue researching this for now. Thanks, all!


Mike. 😉