I know that this has been asked in different ways. But as I am literally, after much consternation, about to buy my first new laptop in many years with the Librem 14 I’d like to ask. I am going to save a few bucks with the ram and will fit 2 X 32gb myself after getting it delivered with just the basic 8gb.
So, following someone else’s suggestion this below looks good:
Someone else recommended SK Hynix ram and I have seen similar specs in this brand at more than twice the price of the Crucial sticks. I’m totally bamboozled by the dazzling array of specs that ram has in the various descriptions so I am totally at sea with this stuff.
I am not afraid to spend money to get quality. My requirements however are not great. I don’t game, I don’t do high end graphics, but I’d just like a fast machine with good quality ram to match the quality laptop. I will be getting the laptop pre-loaded with qubes.
Can anybody offer opinions regarding whether or not the above mentioned Crucial ram is actually good quality, or do people have other thoughts?
Sorry if this seems too basic. I was going to direct my question to Purism support but I didn’t think that they’d be recommending things like this.
Well, my L14 shipped with 1x Crucial 8GB DDR4 stick from Purism. I’ve upgraded to the one above, since.
I’ve been using Crucial (Micron RAM chips) for >10+ years with no failures in a lot of different laptops for myself or for friends (incl. MacBooks/iMacs). They offer life/10yrs warranty - but I haven’t needed it so far.
SK Hynix is also a good brand, I’ve seen it shipped as OEM memory from good laptops.
I really don’t think it’s worth 2x the price of Crucial - which is not a cheap memory. It could just be a price hike due to the chip crisis/market/inflation now. One year ago the Crucial 64GB kit above was well over $300, now it’s $100 cheaper. It depends a lot when/where you buy it from.
— Skip this last part, if not interested in SSD (performance) upgrade – I would save and use that money to upgrade the SSD to a Samsung 970 Pro 1TB - which, after the RAM upgrade, is the other/next best upgrade in terms of performance, especially in an I/O resource intensive OS like Qubes.
I know 980 Pro is significantly cheaper - i.e. the 1TB 970 Pro (MLC) costs almost as much as the 2TB 980 Pro (TLC), but since the L14 is PCIe 3.0 only, it cannot use the ~2x faster max linear speed of 980 Pro (PCIe 4.0).
Also since the 970 Pro (MLC) has 2x the write endurance life (1200TBW vs 600TBW for a 1TB drive), I think it’s worth it over the 980 Pro. On the other hand, since they cost about the same, the 2TB 980 Pro one has the same endurance the 1TB 970 Pro has. Even though the 980 has 2x the max sequential speed and IOPS, on the L14 PCIe 3.0 (Gen3) interface the differences are not so pronounced apparently.
I think Purism also ships the 970 Pro for the NVMe Pro configured options.
Keep in mind that any M.2 NVMe (Pro) drive will also consume more power/put out more heat than the (a few times!) slower “standard” M.2. SATA drives, at least when they are active. This is a compromise which I’ll always happily make.
Of course, you could go another route, get/wait for the L14 3cell battery option - and then put two M.2 SSDs in RAID1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_1) for data redundancy, at least.
Not sure how easy it is to configure in Qubes, but generally the Linux RAID is pretty mature.
having filesystem encryption (LUKS) will complicate things a bit, for sure
this will have a significant impact on power consumption (and battery life) however, even more so since you need to use the smaller 3cell battery
Purism is still is tinkering (and improving) power management in the EC implementation, so this needs to be tested at some point, especially when running on battery
expect more heat to be produced as well (when both drives are actively running)
Or you could just keep the 2nd drive mostly idle (which should have minimum power usage).
use it as an instantly available backup drive with max read/write speed for backup/recovery.
you can copy your archived folders, Qubes VM images, etc
use some backup software
or simply make a 1:1 image of the main drive (dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2) manually/periodically. If the main drive fails or you lose data, you can just select to boot from it, in an instant.
I think I went quite off-topic, so I’ll stop here.
Thanks for the reply. I was always going to upgrade to pro ssd so that is covered. I couldn’t find the really expensive SK Hynix stick yesterday, but check this out:
I think that for my purposes I’ll go with Crucial. Like you I have these in a couple of laptops and have never had an issue.
With the stick above with such a price difference (more than double!) is gets me thinking that maybe there is something to the SK Hynix being THAT much better.
Thanks for the reply and the RAID suggestion, but I’m a small hd person and store things elsewhere rather than on the laptop.