SOLVED: Installing M7 ON SATA Mode M2 SSD IN USB 3 Enclosure

[yankee495]

Hello everyone,

Searching for Boot or Install "Linux on M2 SSD USB Enclosure" gives me everything but what I need, most of it NVMe related, or plain USB stick related.

First, the hardware is:

Team Group MS30 M.2 2280 128GB SATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
DGZOMYTEK M.2 SATA SSD to USB 3.0 External SSD Enclosure with UASP

The USB 3.0 enclosure uses a JMicron JMS567, a low power consumption and high performance USB 3.0 to SATA 6.0Gbps (bit
per second) Bridge controller, so I assume it may act like a standard USB stick?

A tip here for Z77 E4 owners.
The motherboard is a seven year old ASrock Z77 Extreme4 which does have UEFI etc.
I'm using a beta BIOS that allows booting to NVMe device in a PCIe slot mounted adapter. I have no M2 slots on the board.
It works great at 3300 MB/s write and 1800 MB/s read. If you have this board the BIOS is available from the ASrock site.

I tried a plain install in ACHI mode (Non-UEFI), with /, and /swap, and /home, but the boot loader installer didn't have that drive as an option.
Then I booted from Mageia 7 x64 DVD in UEFI mode and I don't know how big the UEFI partition needs to be etc.
Also, I assume it's possible to install it like a normal install, not in live mode.

After two days of searching, I haven't found anything that directly applies to this type of USB device.
I could probably find this information in time, somewhere, but I thought I'd ask here so everyone can see it.

The SSD was $20 and the enclosure was $10. Speed tests are good at 453 read & 414 write.
I'm not going to try and get exact top speed, I just wanted to know if it appeared to be working correctly and it does.
I was hoping for great speed, endurance and durability, at a lower cost than a 128GB USB stick.

My questions are how do I install M7 in a normal Non-live mode?
Also, how do I install M7 to run in Live mode? Is that the same as with a standard USB flash drive using a Live DVD?
I really wanted to use the standard M7 DVD for a standard install and a live install, and not a Live version DVD.
But if that's what i have to do, then I will.

Thank you.

[doktor5000]

You may want to check some older bug report on installation to pure NVMe devices, as that might help with understanding.
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17743

I don't really know if this is an issue as the board does not support booting from USB to NVMe adapters or if it's only a matter of manually needing to install the bootloader to that device.

[yankee495]

Thank you Dok,

I will read more about NVme and USB booting in general. My Beta BIOS works great and isn't the problem.
I wanted to pass on that information because I was shocked to find out I can run NVMe in a PCIe adapter and boot to it.
It's really nice in large folders of images. The thumbnails are fast.

The SSD I'm working with right now is a "SATA Mode" M2 SSD. I have never made a bootable USB stick before and wasn't having much luck.
I didn't know they made a SATA Mode and NVMe SSD and was confused until I studied it a while back.
A SATA mode SSD will do about 550 MBs max like a standard SATA SSD.
A NVMe SSD will do nearly 3500 MBs. Both require different USB enclosures, so make sure you have a SATA mode stick and SATA mode enclosure, or NVMe stick and NVMe enclosure.


I have it booting to USB and it works great.

I used Gnome Disks to format a 300 MB partition to FAT32 and checked "Make Bootable" when formatting it.
I couldn't find this option in the Mageia disk manager but I may have overlooked it.

I then made a 36GB root partition, a 4GB SWAP which likely won't be used, but it's there.
Then I made the rest /home.

I rebooted in BIOS mode (Not UEFI) to the Mageia 7 Install DVD (Not the live DVD) and installed to the USB like a normal HDD.
I selected "Use custom partitioning" and set the 36GB partition to / (root) and the 79GB partition to /home.
When it completed I installed the boot loader to /dev/sdf which is the USB drive. I was not getting this option before.

I can save changes and my software installs are saved. There is one drawback. TRIM might not be working when running in a USB enclosure.
You'd think they would've made sure TRIM worked and maybe they did. I haven't tested it yet but if you use a standard SATA SSD in a USB enclosure, TRIM does not work.
I'm researching everything now.