On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:02:06AM -0400, Russell wrote:
Yea, this is just a tinker-toy. I had figured to put a small backup OS on this, remove its allocation from the chainloader and then leave it alone in the box in case I need it, instead of using a live usb for troubleshooting etc.
It doesn't look like I can mask it's physical presence tho, except by populating a pcie slot and co-opting it's assigned pci lanes, so no security through obscurity.
Instead I went with full Fedora w/gnome. I have 7gib on the drive after a full workstation install so I may rethink stuff and use it as my primary. Optane was meant to be a cache accelerator for booting Windows 10 on a standard drive and thats about the sum of it.
Although, with all the elbow room and thumbscrews in this box, you could use it as a key drive for sneakernet backup to a safety deposit box pretty handily. You'd just need the right finger screw for the 1_M.2 slot standoff post, which is exposed. The other slot is buried under a heat sink.
Well as a toy, $90 is easier to justify than $170. Not sure how many insertions that M.2 slot is rated for. I don't think I would do anything that involves frequent swapping. An external thunderbolt connected NVMe drive would survive that much better. -- Len Sorensen