*** MyDigitalSSD SBXe 960 GB success story ***

[as400]

Today I installed this drive with @danielt hack (thanks ).
PBP was at 14% of battery at the time I booted it and the boot was successful. Then I copied almost entire filesystem from eMMC to SSD and it went fine.

So I think one might say it works OK. If anything bad happens I will update this thread.

I ordered it on amazon and it came quite quick delivered straight from amazon warehouse by DHL.


edit1: I have put it into hardware accessory compatibility list on wiki.


edit2: Some performance comparison between eMMC and NVME:


[root@pbp ~]# hdparm -Tt --direct /dev/nvme0n1


/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing O_DIRECT cached reads:   1934 MB in  2.00 seconds = 966.69 MB/sec
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
 Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 2646 MB in  3.00 seconds = 881.86 MB/sec




[root@pbp ~]# hdparm -Tt --direct /dev/mmcblk2

/dev/mmcblk2:
 Timing O_DIRECT cached reads:   300 MB in  2.01 seconds = 149.55 MB/sec
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument
 Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 440 MB in  3.01 seconds = 146.42 MB/sec

[Redbeard]

Excellent!   Great information.  

One thing I'd like to compile is the power setting options of compatible drives.   Would you be willing to run:

sudo nvme id-ctrl /dev/nvme0

And post the part of the results related to power states?  For an example of what this section looks like, see the power limiting section of the wiki.

Another thing that would be good to know is if the drive will accept the -s (save) switch when setting the power state.  For some (most?) drives the save switch works as expected and saves the power state even after rebooting.    But for my Intel 660p drive if I use the -s switch it returns an error.   Assuming the desired power state is  2* you could test this by running:

sudo nvme set-feature /dev/nvme0 -f 2 -v 2 -s

If that that doesn't throw an error, it sounds like it should work.  If it throws an error message,  there is a workaround. 

*See the linked section of the wiki for details.

[tophneal]

One thing I'd like to compile is the power setting options of compatible drives.

Great idea, it'd be great to see these added in the wiki or Google spreadsheet! That would be very helpful for those down the road, not brave enough to test unfamiliar hardware.

[as400]

OK, so let's start with the information that APST is enabled on Manjaro.

Looks like power states are a bit strange because the drive reports completely different states than measured in tests on legitreviews (and my drive is even newer than that in test and should be more "eco" - hence name SBXe):



The report from drive:

ps    0 : mp:7.90W operational enlat:600 exlat:600 rrt:0 rrl:0

          rwt:0 rwl:0 idle_power:0.7250W active_power:7.02W
ps    1 : mp:7.90W operational enlat:600 exlat:600 rrt:1 rrl:1
          rwt:1 rwl:1 idle_power:0.7250W active_power:7.02W
ps    2 : mp:7.90W operational enlat:600 exlat:600 rrt:2 rrl:2
          rwt:2 rwl:2 idle_power:0.7250W active_power:7.02W
ps    3 : mp:0.1000W non-operational enlat:1000 exlat:1000 rrt:3 rrl:3
          rwt:3 rwl:3 idle_power:0.7250W active_power:7.02W
ps    4 : mp:0.0050W non-operational enlat:5000 exlat:100000 rrt:4 rrl:4
          rwt:4 rwl:4 idle_power:0.7250W active_power:7.02W

After some inactivity:

[root@pbp ~]# nvme get-feature /dev/nvme0 -f 2

get-feature:0x2 (Power Management), Current value:0x000004

The "save" feature does not work:

NVMe status: FEATURE_NOT_SAVEABLE: The Feature Identifier specified does not support a saveable value(0x210d)


The drive uses some rare (AFAIK) controller - Phison E13T. But on the other hand supports everything on power management one can expect - APST, ASPM, L1.2.

[Redbeard]

That is really interesting. I would go with the published test results and your direct experience with it in thePBP over the reported power state options. Since all three active settings are 7.9 W, and real tests show it uses much less, it makes me think they don't really support power management through that feature and instead use their own code and/or the other protocols you mention.

[Arwen]

I've added 2 columns for the power settings and added @as400 data;

Wiki - Pinebook Pro - Hardware Accessory Compatibility

As usual, feel free to correct, improve or comment, (good or politely bad).

[tophneal]

I've added 2 columns for the power settings and added @as400 data;

Wiki - Pinebook Pro - Hardware Accessory Compatibility

As usual, feel free to correct, improve or comment, (good or politely bad).

This links to the editing page. Needs the #submit taken off the end of the URL.

[as400]

I just managed to boot from nvme with the latest uboot-pinebookpro-2017.09-2-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz provided by Manjaro Team.
As far as I know it has patches from @pcm720 included.

Uboot resides on eMMC and the rest of the system is on nvme.

[Arwen]

I've added 2 columns for the power settings and added @as400 data;

Wiki - Pinebook Pro - Hardware Accessory Compatibility

As usual, feel free to correct, improve or comment, (good or politely bad).

This links to the editing page. Needs the #submit taken off the end of the URL.

Fixed, (both my post and yours).

Thanks for pointing that out.

I had removed it the first time, but when it created the link in the wrong place, I re-created with the extra edit part.

[tophneal]

No problem! Noticed that and figured it might lead to issues if someone clicked it and made accidental changes without noticing.