So after much agonising I am finally going to go for a V14 laptop over all of the competitors. I’m already in for a L5 so I might as well stay true to the cause! I’m pretty savvy with most things but have a couple of questions that I hope people here can answer so I order just what I need.
To save some money I am just going to order it with 8gb of RAM but I’m looking to push it up to 32gb when I get it. I’m not at all up with what is good quality, and I want good quality. I was thinking about this pack: shorturl.at/rtyHM to bring it up to 32gb. Are there others that people may consider better?
Does anyone know the difference between the NVMe and NVMe pro drives? I can’t seem to find anything about this but the price difference suggests that there is a significant difference.
I’m going to get qubes installed and the pure boot bundle plus anti interdiction with the Librem key. I know nothing about how this key is used. I know that it has functions with storing keys etc that I’m sure I’ll grow into but my question is this: Does the provision of a Librem key mean that when I boot my laptop up that the key has to be present and that I input a passphrase/code to have the laptop start up? If so I love this idea.
One last thing…do I have to buy the charger in addition to the laptop? It looks like its separate. I want to get the initial order spot on.
If this isn’t the place for these questions I apologise and am more than happy to redirect my questions elsewhere, but I’m hoping that the obvious expertise that is on display here will be able to help me.
I believe the chipset and the laptop are PCIe 3.0 only.
Without two specific NVMe drives to compare it is difficult to say but a large price difference could be the number of bits per cell i.e. 2-bit MLC (DLC) v. 3-bit MLC (TLC).
The more bits per cell, the lower the cost per gigabyte - and, at the higher capacity end of disks, better physical density (gigabytes per unit volume) which is important when you are limited to the dimensions of an existing disk specification (whether that’s 2.5" SATA or M.2 2280).
On my server I went for lower bits per cell (and paid more per gigabyte of course). On an access device maybe not so important (it’s all backed up to the server / on the server, right?). It does depend on how the customer intends to use the device.
I think this is combining several different concepts. (Disclaimer: I don’t have one.)
The Librem Key verifies the integrity of the boot partition (and optionally parts of the root partition). The Key has to be present in order to do that but I believe you can boot without it (highly desirable in case you lose / mislay / forget the Key). That is, if the Key is not present then you are choosing to boot without that integrity check but you can still boot.
If you are not using encryption of the root partition then there is no passphrase to supply in order to boot.
If you are using encryption of the root partition (which you should be!) then there is something to supply in order to get the encryption master key. I believe you have the choice of just entering a passphrase yourself, and that may be the default, but you may additionally be able to unlock the encryption master key using the Key, in which case you would need to enter the PIN in order to unlock the Key. Again, you can boot without the Key provided that you know the passphrase for manual unlocking of the encryption master key.
Some pre-sales support questions might be better directed to Purism: support@puri.sm
OK, so the Pro is technically PCIe 4.0 but I still think it will be limited to PCIe 3.0 in the Librem 14. Someone correct me if I am wrong. If I’m correct then I would stick with the “vanilla” unless the SSD is likely to be swapped into a different computer in the future.
And you can ignore what I said about DLC v. TLC etc. They are both TLC.
Thank you everyone for your considered replies. The drive options are and for my meagre purposes I dare say that the std NVMe will work for me.
Thanks for the info re the key as well. Definitely a gadget I need. I will also take the advice of contacting support in the next week or so just before I order. Its all very exciting as I haven’t invested this much in a laptop for many many years.
