Hey guys,

Just curious if someone has done it before and thoughts behind it. I’ve ordered a 16 with GPU and was wondering what’s the best way of setting up the system when it arrives.

My primary OS is Arch Linux and I prefer not to split the disk for windows. And I happen to see some folks might be booting an OS through an expansion card ( I got the 1TB ).

My windows usage is primarily Steam and nothing else. The expansion card seems fast enough to run an OS, but it doesn’t look as fast as an SSD or NVMe, so games like starfield might suffer some performance is my current guess. If my guess is right, does it mean it’s better to have some external SSD to use as storage?

What do you guys think?

  • lebbiBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    windows wont let you install on an external drive, but there are ways to force it. generally, i would not recommend it. you will have performance issues.

  • Zeddie-BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I plan on installing Fedora on the 2230 drive while Windows will be on the 2280 drive.

    While I use Linux as my primary OS, it’s mostly for low performance stuff (web browsing, maybe some emulation, etc).

    Windows will be used for gaming so wanted a bigger and faster drive for it.

    You can change it up if you want. But I wouldn’t recommend an external USB drive as an OS drive. Windows wouldn’t install on it anyways, but Linux can. For some use cases that may be good. If I wanted a Linux OS to boot from but also portable to use on a different PC if I needed to, that would be a great use case. Would probably encrypt it for good measure for this use case. It may be great if you want another main OS on the internal drive and an immutable or live USB living in your laptop that gives you the option to use on another PC for security reasons (only used for banking or for crypto transactions for example).

  • Dangerous_Way816BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    You shouldn’t use an expansion card as an OS-drive. But you could split your SSD into multiple partitions and dual boot off of it. On the other hand you could use the second SSD slot as well.

    ​

    My best advice would be to make a really small Windows partition (only the OS plus a bit of storage for personal stuff) and use an expansion card as your game storage. That way you could use it on a different machine as well.

  • 67darwinOPBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Thanks folks!

    Seems like it’s impossible to run Windows on expansion card (shows my lack of knowledge of the OS), so it’s either Linux on the expansion card, or just install each OS on the separate SSDs.

    I actually forgot there were 2 SSDs coming with it, so SSD option actually works.