NVMe experience

[skallal]

I bought a refurbished Lenovo M910s back in late January. But I made the mistake of thinking it had no M.2 slots. In fact it has one for NVMe and another for WiFi. I was expecting to see slots on top of connectors like the PCIe slots in the rear. But the M.2 cards are installed horizontally so the sockets are on side of the connectors and not the top. It's a case of not being familiar with hardware changes in the past few years. I was stuck with SATA SSDs or so I thought.

So I got a 1TB NVMe stick and put it in the Lenovo. I created an MX snapshot, but for some unknown reason it wouldn't install although the thumb drive passed an error check twice.

Next I booted from the latest Clonezilla and used the option to clone one disk to another. But for some then unknown reason, it couldn't boot from the NVMe even though it showed up in gparted. It did actually boot but kept loading the current SSD instead of the new drive. Finally I disconnected the current SATA SSD and booted up again. This time it booted okay on the NVMe.

As stated it actually booted from the NVMe but redirected to the current SSD. The UUID value got duplicated when cloning drives. Next step was to boot Live USB and fix the UUID on the NVMe partition and update grub.cfg. Fortunately editing that file was enough and now I can boot either drive by selecting them in the BIOS. The other trick is to change the UUID value in fstab for mounting to /. Perhaps Clonezilla has an option to change the UUID on the target disk?

The NVMe is so much faster than the SATA SSD on the gnome-disk-utility benchmark by about a 10 to 1 ratio. Oddly Linux doesn't seem much faster. But Windows 11 on KVM is a night and day difference. Now it's fast enough for casual use or more where before it hung up a lot when the memory filled up, even with 16 GB RAM in the VM. I think it's the swap file was getting thrashed. The best emulator for a Window machine is a dedicated Windows machine. That is unless one uses a high end host machine with KVM, proxmox etc. It's much easier for a Windows machine to host a Linux guest in a VM, than for a Linux host with a Windows guest VM. Windows is a bloated resource hog. But this a friendly audience.

[CharlesV]

Glad to hear you have that nvme. Windows in a VM based on that nvme will be sweet! I have multiples I run and the are very quick.

[FullScale4Me]

Windows 11 even with 8 GB of memory, if the VM is on a Solid State drive settles down after a minute or so to be very usable. Windows 10 takes > 10 minutes to be almost as good.