06-20-2020, 05:57 PM
The wiki has some useful documentation on the M.2 adapter, but be aware (for daily driver use) that deep sleep is unreliable (read, "mostly doesn't work") with at least most of the NVMe SSDs installed. There's some issues with them, and unless you're really, really dead set on NVMe (at the cost of deep sleep most likely not working), I'd suggest just using the eMMC for a root partition (buy the 128GB one if you need), and toss a decent uSD card in the slot for extra storage.
The "safe" way to use your NVMe SSD is to keep your boot partition on the eMMC and pivot to the SSD for your root filesystem/home. Throw swap on the eMMC, put zswap in front of it, and you're golden.
Alternately, you can flash the various boot binaries (uboot and crew) on the internal SPI chip, which ships empty. This is a decently safe path, but if something goes wrong, it's a lot harder to recover. If you screw up the eMMC, just open the case, disable the eMMC, and there's a sequence of switch fiddling that will let you boot from firmware on the SSD and then access the eMMC. If you screw up the SPI, it's a bit of a more involved path to recover.
What are you doing that requires all the storage, out of curiosity? 128GB + a 256GB uSD card is an awful lot of reasonably performant storage unless you're really hammering the random IO (I wouldn't keep the OS on the uSD card, but the eMMC is halfway decent - slow compared to the NVMe SSD, but also lets you sleep, which is important).
I've been daily driving mine on the eMMC, and it's quite nice (I wrote up a tutorial for Ubuntu 20.04 down in the tutorials section, to include deep sleep and sound). I've got the NVMe adapter, but until the sleep issues are worked out, I don't feel like I'm generally lacking in disk performance. Try it for a while before you decide to switch things out.
The "safe" way to use your NVMe SSD is to keep your boot partition on the eMMC and pivot to the SSD for your root filesystem/home. Throw swap on the eMMC, put zswap in front of it, and you're golden.
Alternately, you can flash the various boot binaries (uboot and crew) on the internal SPI chip, which ships empty. This is a decently safe path, but if something goes wrong, it's a lot harder to recover. If you screw up the eMMC, just open the case, disable the eMMC, and there's a sequence of switch fiddling that will let you boot from firmware on the SSD and then access the eMMC. If you screw up the SPI, it's a bit of a more involved path to recover.
What are you doing that requires all the storage, out of curiosity? 128GB + a 256GB uSD card is an awful lot of reasonably performant storage unless you're really hammering the random IO (I wouldn't keep the OS on the uSD card, but the eMMC is halfway decent - slow compared to the NVMe SSD, but also lets you sleep, which is important).
I've been daily driving mine on the eMMC, and it's quite nice (I wrote up a tutorial for Ubuntu 20.04 down in the tutorials section, to include deep sleep and sound). I've got the NVMe adapter, but until the sleep issues are worked out, I don't feel like I'm generally lacking in disk performance. Try it for a while before you decide to switch things out.