Hello, I want to turn my extra computer into a sort of linux distro hopper pc. The machine has an asrock B550m steel legend motherboard, ryzen 3900x, and a rtx 3080. My plan is to buy a NVMe ssd enclosure for the front of the case and a bunch of nvme ssds and easily switch out the ssd for the different OS’s I want to try. I’m looking at the ICY DOCK U.2 Enclouse MB021VP-B My plan is to get that and a M.2 to SFF-8654 adapter and a male to male SFF-8654 cable. While I think all that of that will plug into my motherboard, not sure if it will work how I want it to or at all. Also, if anyone has suggestions for a cheaper high performance alternative let me know.
I’d ask how often you wanna use windows in the mean time/ while trialing
Correct me if I’m wrong, but sounds like the idea of the dock, is so each install does not interfere with each other, and you can change easily between them.
I don’t think you need a dock for that, as different distro’s will work pretty well with each other, on different partitions on the same drive.
If you plan for each distro to have about 40GB space, then say 10 testing distro’s would use about 400gb space. If you get a 1 tb ssd, you can have a boot partition at the start, a /home partition at the end (maybe 200gb?) and each install, just make a individual partition for it in the installer in the inbetween space.
If swap partition makes you feel more comfortable, you can add a /swap near the end, before the /home partition.
When you set up your first distro, if it’s a Debian or Ubuntu flavour, you can set the boot section, and every time you’ll install a new distro, choose the same one, and it’ll update the list, setting the newest install as the default…
Some distro’s won’t work with grub, and so you may have to later re-create the boot partition, but by the time you have tried a couple distro’s, then going back is literally like the first one you did, so should be ez pz (I mean, once you jumped the hurdle once, the rest of the field is a straight run…)
If you wont use Windows much, removing the drive and putting to one side can give peace of mind about it as a fallback/backup.
This is all assuming the second NVMe slot is not occupied by an SSD already… in which case… um, dang.
If you want to use windows often, and play with linux a bit, you could remove the windows drive, have just a drive for linux in, do the install, plug windows back, and use the UEFI boot selector to change the default to Windows, and just change it to “other” on boot time?
Sorry if both slots are already occupied, but was thinking just a drive would do (prehaps with a cheap-ish PCIe mounted add in card in the PCIe3x16 slot)
(I was literally just thinking o f a cheaper way to do this, not an easier way. The dock with several U.2 drives might be less daunting, and if you got the budget, would work)
Yeah, windows is kind of the problem. The computer is my windows steam vr pc and my only windows pc at the moment. I mostly want to try stardust xr and steam vr on linux distros and do some experiential linux vr/xr game dev. I’ve had really bad luck with multi os on one drive.
1 Like
Fair; it’s your story, and you’re the one having to face the installer and making sure not to nuke the wrong drive.
Or having one OS decide none of the others are allowed to run anymore.
If you got the budget for it, I’m sure you can use the dock as you suggested, with an m.2 addin as you figured … I don’t have any links for a compatible model tho, sorry
I still think you could have a PCIe add in card with an M.2 SSD on it, for the linux installs, and switch using the UEFI / BIOS / /motherboard “press F9 to choose boot menu” option, or whatever, but again, it’s your money and time, and for you, the time (research, frustration, pain, electrical sacrifices of household pest etc) might end up costing more
1 Like
Alright, I thought of a cheaper jankier solution. I can get a U.2 to M.2 ssd adapter cable and a M.2 to ssd to U.2 adapter and mount the adapter to the top my case and Just swap out the the drive from there.
i run this like you but i do it on an amd itx board with these in a 8x4x4x Bifurcation config
the 8x has an mellanox 100gbe in it and those two m.2 by 4x slots use the same adapter like you with the same cable but this connects directly to two CD6 Kioxias
1 Like
That’s a x16 card, right? How is bandwidth and throughput going with just 8 lanes?
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 273 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.