Cooling the Crucial T705 Gen5 NVMe Beast

📅 May 11, 2024
“Too hot to handle. Literally.”

After using the Crucial T705 in both Linux and Windows, I can say for certain that this NVMe becomes very hot very fast. Cooling is essential.

My motherboard heatsink is adequate and does an okay task of keeping the Gen5 NVMe running within operating temperatures, but it still becomes blisteringly hot to the touch.

Is there a better solution?

I obtained three different third-party NVMe heatsinks to find out and see if improving the NVMe heatsink would make a difference.

The answer? Yes, it makes a difference. Here are my super-scientific results obtained through trial and error and guesswork.

WD Black SN850X Gen4 NVMe and Linux

Oh, yes! Another NVMe to experiment with in Linux!

This time, let’s look at the Western Digital Black SN850X Gen4 NVMe and how it compares to the Crucial T705 Gen5 NVMe in the same system.

Will there be much of a difference between Gen4 and Gen5?

Does it work with Linux? Yes, indeed!

Crucial T705 Gen5 NVMe and Linux

📅 May 8, 2024
“What? Is Gen4 NVMe not fast enough for Little Timmy’s game?”

I had the opportunity to use the latest and greatest Gen5 to see how it would perform in Linux and Windows. Results were…interesting.

The T705 is a step up from the T700 and advertises “up to” (uh-oh, there it is again…the dreaded “up to” clause) 13,600 MB/s reads, so this should make Little Timmy happy. Let’s test this using Disks.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Released

📅 May 2, 2024
Ubuntu 24.04 was released in April 2024 (a few days ago as of the time of this writing), and it is the latest in the LTS (Long Term Support) version of the Ubuntu series.

This also means that the other Ubuntu-derivative distributions, such as Xubuntu, Ubuntu Server, and Ubuntu Cinnamon, have also been given the upgrade treatment.

PeppermintOS – A Lightweight Linux Distribution

📅 April 18, 2024
“Less is more.”

No, this is not referring to the command less (which is more, by the way) but to a lightweight, minimal Linux distribution named peppermintOS that is perfect for lower-powered hardware or virtual machines where performance matters more than bells and whistles.

LVM Part 4: RAID

📅 April 6, 2024
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is available in Linux using mdadm, but did you know that RAID is also possible with LVM?

By default, LVM creates a linear logical volume, but we can create a RAID logical volume as well with RAID modes 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, and 10 (also known as 1+0).

How is RAID accomplished with LVM?

LVM Part 3: Logical Volumes

📅 April 3, 2024
We have created physical volume building blocks. We assigned them to volume group storage pools. Now, it is time for the final piece of the LVM system: logical volumes.

The logical volume is the “thing” that we format, mount, and allow users to interact with. We can treat a logical volume just like any other NVMe, SSD, or HDD.

LVM Part 2: Volume Groups

📅 April 1, 2024
We have our physical volumes created, but what do we do with them?

Can we format them? Can we store data on them?

No, not yet. A physical volume merely specifies a drive or partition that is to be used with LVM. The next step is to assign physical volumes to volume groups, and this is were the fun and flexibility of LVM becomes apparent.

LVM Part 1: Physical Volumes

📅 March 31, 2024
Linux has a number of handy technologies built in that have existed for a long time but seem to receive little attention because they are taken for granted or simply not talked about.

One of these is logical volume management (LVM) that allows us to treat hard drive storage space in a way similar to RAM. Comparable to adding another memory stick to expand RAM, we can add more hard drives to expand hard drive storage space. Need more secondary storage? Just add another hard drive.

This simple concept is incredibly versatile and saves time by eliminating the need to backup and restore data following a new drive addition to a system. It requires some extra steps to set up and has a few specific terms to learn, but the benefits are worthwhile.

LVM consists of three layers to create a working storage system. In this part, we will focus on the physical drives themselves, called physical volumes. These can be mechanical hard drives, SSDs, SAS, or even super fast NVMe storage devices.

Bash: Typed Variables with declare

📅 March 23, 2024
Variables are untyped in Bash by default, but there might be times when we need to create variables that hold only specific data types or have specific purposes.

The declare command allows us to achieve this in order to add extra protections on variables, and there are a few different types allowed.

Need a variable that only stores lowercase strings? How about an integer only and reject all other values? Maybe you need an indexed or associative array? Perhaps you need to create a constant?