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I've bought a Lenovo ThinkPad E540 back in 2013. It came with a 512GB hard disk, which I replaced with a 256GB SSD. When I ordered it there was something written about the 512GB hard disk, that it has a SSD cache on top. I never knew what was meant by that, until I opened my laptop yesterday to put in some more RAM. Then I saw, that there's a 16GB m.2 SSD sitting inside my laptop. It is mounted as /dev/sdb as it turns out.

Is there something useful I can use that m.2 for? As I understand it, m.2 are currently not faster than SATA3, so I don't see a point in installing the OS to the m.2 drive (or is there?). Is there anything "useful", I can do with it?

Btw. I found this post: 16GB SSD booster on ubuntu, but I think that doesn't apply to me, since I've got an SSD, not a traditional hard drive

Community
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wawa
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2 Answers2

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Likely the old 16 GB m.2 SSD will not be faster than your new 256 GB SSD you now had installed. Therefore we may not experience any performance boosts from moving the OS, cache, or tmp directories to that drive.

Nevertheless you may find the additional fast storage space useful for many purposes. Just a few examples that just came into my mind:

  • format and use it as /swap space to replace Swap on the precious new drive. It will give you additional space on your main drive, it may not wear out much if you only use part of that drive, and if it dies of age you will still be able to boot your OS.
  • use it as a temporary backup directory to save your daily work.
  • install another OS for dual-booting from that drive.
  • hide it from the desktop to store your secrets there.

Even if there was no use case at present it may be good to know that there is an m.2 slot in this laptop where we could install a larger SSD later.

Takkat
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  • Thought about hide and store stuff like ssh keys there. About using it as swap, is this possible if the main drive (where swap is currently) is encrypted with LUKS? if yes, do you have a link, describing how to do that? – wawa Nov 24 '15 at 14:08
  • For swap: http://askubuntu.com/questions/33697/how-do-i-add-a-swap-partition-after-system-installation - you need to disable your exisitng swap first. – Takkat Nov 24 '15 at 14:11
  • Definitely I would use it as swap. 16GB of uber-fast swap = never run out of memory *evil laugh* – Daniel Nov 24 '15 at 14:37
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Your 16Gb SSD was probably intended for use in Intel Rapid Storage Technology. It caches reads and writes to the hard drive on a (faster but smaller) SSD. It would have worked on Windows 7 that I suppose your laptop originally came with.

You could probably tinker with it, find a driver that will work in Ubuntu (Intel provide some documentation) but as your main disk is now SSD, this is no longer worth it. Just see it as some extra space.

Jos
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  • You're right about Win7 and that it is used to cache the original disk. I kind of hoped there is like something useful I can do with it. I thought about to use it as dedicated "ram" for virtual machines but on the other hand usually the fit in my normal ram. – wawa Nov 24 '15 at 13:56