*** Intel NVME 660p SSD Success Story ***

[MiiCode2]

If anyone is looking for an NVME drive for their Pinebook Pro, I have tested the 512GB Intel 660p M.2 2280 SSD on battery power and I am happy to report and recommend it.

I tested it on the Manjaro Preview 4.  At 5% battery power Manjaro warns that the battery is low and that you should either select Hibernate, Suspend or Shutdown.


I kept the Pinebook Pro powered on for about 9 Hrs with drive mounted and the screen turned off.

Occasionally I would turn on the screen and copy a 14GB file from the SSD to the emmc.

I also duplicated the 14GB file on the SSD.  On the SSD my speed was was consistently about 230 mb/sec.

I decided to keep on running and was copying 5GB of 14GB when the laptop appeared to try and turn off at 2% battery power.

I should note that for the last 1.5 hours I had the screen on at about 50% brightness.

The Inted SSD operates at 3.3V and draws a maximum 1.35 amps.  So that works out to 4.46 watts.

The part number is SSDPEKNW512G8X1.

[tophneal]

Thanks for sharing! Have you added this to the compatible hardware table/page on the wiki?

[Wizzard]

I added

[MiiCode2]

I added

Thanks Wizzard!

[qchapter1]

Thanks MiiCode2, just ordered one.

[Arwen]

Updated the Wiki for NVMe drives, and made the size a separate column. Should make finding the size you want easier, (when we have more NVMe drives to choose from).

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

[nakato]

Have you tested if suspend works with that NVMe drive?

I've used a WDS500G1B0C, and suspend fails with the default Mate builds and Ayufan Ubuntu's.

[Luke]

Great post OP - stickied.

@Arwen thank you for adding a NVMe compatibility section to the wiki

[llsf]

Interesting: I have the exact same SSD. Started a larger compilation job to build overnight which, I assume in combination with the at that point non-dimmed display, drained the battery even with the charger being plugged in*. In the morning I was greeted by an LED flashing red and the system not reacting anymore. After a reboot I had a ~64% battery charge and no NVME being recognized. Only came back after powering it down, charging some more and starting it up again.

So: be careful when building Firefox from source, I'd guess?

*currently repeating the build. With a heavily dimmed display, it neither charges nor discharges but remains at (atm) 91%. Using the stock charger.

/edit

Other than that I like the drive; it seems to be a good value for what you get.

[Redbeard]

I'm still waiting for my Pinebook pro to arrive, so in the meantime I've been reading through the wiki and forums.  This is truly incredible.  I haven't been this excited about tech and linux in years!

I haven't been able to test the drive in the Pinebook Pro yet, but I have what I think is the 1 TB version of the NVME referenced in the OP.  However, since I  run Linux on my main desktop I am able to see the power requirements for the drive per the instructions in Post NVMe install power limiting in the wiki.  In the example in the wiki, the lowest power draw that would still keep the drive active was 3.8 watts.  If I'm reading the output of nvme-cli correctly the Intel drive I have will work on an even lower power setting of 2.2 watts!  Here is the abbreviated output from sudo nvme id-ctrl /dev/nvme0

NVME Identify Controller:
vid     : 0x8086
ssvid   : 0x8086
sn      : ################    
mn      : INTEL SSDPEKNW010T8                     

...

ps    0 : mp:4.00W operational enlat:0 exlat:0 rrt:0 rrl:0
          rwt:0 rwl:0 idle_power:- active_power:-
ps    1 : mp:3.00W operational enlat:0 exlat:0 rrt:1 rrl:1
          rwt:1 rwl:1 idle_power:- active_power:-
ps    2 : mp:2.20W operational enlat:0 exlat:0 rrt:2 rrl:2
          rwt:2 rwl:2 idle_power:- active_power:-
ps    3 : mp:0.0300W non-operational enlat:5000 exlat:5000 rrt:3 rrl:3
          rwt:3 rwl:3 idle_power:- active_power:-
ps    4 : mp:0.0040W non-operational enlat:5000 exlat:9000 rrt:4 rrl:4
          rwt:4 rwl:4 idle_power:- active_power:-

Once I'm able to confirm compatibility with the Pinebook pro, I'll post back here and add it to the compatible hardware section of the wiki.  One thing I would suggest would be to add a column listing the lowest power draw that keeps the respective drive active.

The description for the drive on Newegg reads:  Intel 660p Series M.2 2280 1TB PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 3D2, QLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDPEKNW010T8X1