4 ms·

I’m one of the chorus. I actually preordered a TOTL Asus Zephyrus Duo about a month ago, and it came in last week. It’s been a dream so far — 16 real cores of A

I’m one of the chorus. I actually preordered a TOTL Asus Zephyrus Duo about a month ago, and it came in last week. It’s been a dream so far — 16 real cores of AMD 7945HX, laptop 4090, hybrid graphics, two real screens! Main display is a quite color-accurate 16:10 miniled with 240hz freesync, lower display is a high-PPI IPS touch panel, dual raid-able M2 slots (I put in dual WD SN850Xs in raid0 and that’s showing ~14.5GB/s reads and ~13Gb/s writes in CrystalDiskMark), decent sound and webcam, keyboard is at the bottom edge…the only downsides are the touchpad size is a bit strange (portrait orientation) and the click on it doesn’t feel quite Macbook nice, no USB4, and the power brick is very brick-like, with a thick cable that doesn’t flex very well. Cooling is excellent due to the intake fans under the second screen combined with the lower heat output of the AMD chip, allowing it to run maxed out without throttling…they did this right. I can’t get Pop_OS to install yet, guessing it might need the AMD raid driver like Windows did, requires further investigation. Anyway, excited for a Framework version too! While I prefer AMD integrated graphics to Intel, NVidia dGPU would be even better, and even better still if it was upgradable. Are laptop GPUs still available on MXM cards?

Brian_K_White 4y ago
Why even try to use the hardware raid? I can't imagine it actually performs any better than mdraid, and with mdraid the drives are as portable as plain drives. You could destroy the special laptop and stick the drives into usb enclosures and access the array again on any other machine.
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  Tell me you work in ops with out saying you work in ops. :-) Btw, this is excellent advice. Funny story, I have a FreeNAS device and the motherboard died and I thought "Oh my, I need to bring my ZFS volumes up on another machine, but I didn't have another machine with 6 SATA bays! I ended up having the drives all sitting out on the workbench connected a mainboard with 8 SATA ports so that I could create an archive of the data, and then got the mainboard fixed so I could re-assemble and re-use the FreeNAS but still it alerted me to the fact that I really needed a 6-8 drive cabinet if I wanted to do this again.
  - lillecarl 4y ago
    https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/shitbox/disko.nix https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/shitbox/disko... this is my declarative partitioning scheme, I use mdraid, LUKS, LVM and btrfs. I also mirror my bootloader so if one drive dies I can still boot :) Hardware raid is legacy :)
    - itchynosedev 4y ago
      Never used disko, are there any gotchas? Will it format my drivers if I run nix rebuild?
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      That's only until the machine in question is 5000km away and the soonest time you can get to it is in the three months. Sure, for personal usage there is almost no usage for the HW RAID, but when you need to make sure what the system would always boot and it can't be serviced in hours/days - then you have almost no options for SW RAID.
      - Brian_K_White 4y ago
        Incorrect. No problem to put /boot on a raid1 on a small partition across all drives, so that any drive can boot, and no problem to even include a whole self-contained remotely accessible recovery os. It's a little bit more work to set up, but if you are professing a need for that, then a little extra setup is de rigueur. I remotely administered a ton of linux boxes in racks scattered across the US like that for years. Although I had out of band serial console access and could do full bare metal reinstall that way, I could also do it from any neighboring machine that was still running in the same rack if I had to, with a combination of network booting and/or booting from any one of the normal drives normal raid1 copies of the /boot partition. Further remote-able fallback options that I never even had to use but could: Local hands just plucks a hot-swap drive from any of my other machines and pops it into the bad machine. All drives had the same bootable partition and all drives are redundant and so they could yank literally any one from the wall of server fronts. Or, better, local hands just plugs in a thumb drive and I take care of the rest. Thumb drive is already sitting there for that purpose, or they could make a new one from a download. But with 8 to 24 hot-swap drives per machine, meaning 8-24 copies of /boot, I never even once needed local hands to so much as plug in a thumb drive. There is just no problem at all with sw raid. It only provides options, not remove them.
- Scramblejams 4y ago
  Good call. I have manually repaired a few mdadm arrays in my time that would have surely been complete losses in the hardware RAID systems I've encountered.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  +1. Years ago I had a Raid1 mirror that failed because the controller itself went bonkers, and both drives were accumulating errors. Luckily I was using mdraid and could recover their files by using testdisk [0] on both of them separately as USB drives on a different Linux machine. Was a really really long process; I pray the storage divinities not to have to live those couple days again. [0] https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
ChuckMcM 4y ago
That is a pretty niche laptop, I think the Framework folks are going more for the every day driver kind of experience. I've got a Framework 13 and really like it, it is, for me, a pretty solid Thinkpad replacement. But the real icing on the cake will be when I update the motherboard for an upgrade. (since it is relatively new I don't expect that to happen until maybe next year). On the Asus, are both screens touch screens? Or is only the lower screen a touch screen? I had looked at 20:2 type touch screens to do a sort of "media bar" setup on my desktop but didn't find anything at the time I could use. I'm wondering how well such a setup might work.
heavyset_go 4y ago
How's the battery life on it?

Brian_K_White 4y ago

Why even try to use the hardware raid? I can't imagine it actually performs any better than mdraid, and with mdraid the drives are as portable as plain drives. You could destroy the special laptop and stick the drives into usb enclosures and access the array again on any other machine.

ChuckMcM 4y ago
Tell me you work in ops with out saying you work in ops. :-) Btw, this is excellent advice. Funny story, I have a FreeNAS device and the motherboard died and I thought "Oh my, I need to bring my ZFS volumes up on another machine, but I didn't have another machine with 6 SATA bays! I ended up having the drives all sitting out on the workbench connected a mainboard with 8 SATA ports so that I could create an archive of the data, and then got the mainboard fixed so I could re-assemble and re-use the FreeNAS but still it alerted me to the fact that I really needed a 6-8 drive cabinet if I wanted to do this again.
- lillecarl 4y ago
  https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/shitbox/disko.nix https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/shitbox/disko... this is my declarative partitioning scheme, I use mdraid, LUKS, LVM and btrfs. I also mirror my bootloader so if one drive dies I can still boot :) Hardware raid is legacy :)
  - itchynosedev 4y ago
    Never used disko, are there any gotchas? Will it format my drivers if I run nix rebuild?
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    That's only until the machine in question is 5000km away and the soonest time you can get to it is in the three months. Sure, for personal usage there is almost no usage for the HW RAID, but when you need to make sure what the system would always boot and it can't be serviced in hours/days - then you have almost no options for SW RAID.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      Incorrect. No problem to put /boot on a raid1 on a small partition across all drives, so that any drive can boot, and no problem to even include a whole self-contained remotely accessible recovery os. It's a little bit more work to set up, but if you are professing a need for that, then a little extra setup is de rigueur. I remotely administered a ton of linux boxes in racks scattered across the US like that for years. Although I had out of band serial console access and could do full bare metal reinstall that way, I could also do it from any neighboring machine that was still running in the same rack if I had to, with a combination of network booting and/or booting from any one of the normal drives normal raid1 copies of the /boot partition. Further remote-able fallback options that I never even had to use but could: Local hands just plucks a hot-swap drive from any of my other machines and pops it into the bad machine. All drives had the same bootable partition and all drives are redundant and so they could yank literally any one from the wall of server fronts. Or, better, local hands just plugs in a thumb drive and I take care of the rest. Thumb drive is already sitting there for that purpose, or they could make a new one from a download. But with 8 to 24 hot-swap drives per machine, meaning 8-24 copies of /boot, I never even once needed local hands to so much as plug in a thumb drive. There is just no problem at all with sw raid. It only provides options, not remove them.
Scramblejams 4y ago
Good call. I have manually repaired a few mdadm arrays in my time that would have surely been complete losses in the hardware RAID systems I've encountered.
squarefoot 4y ago
+1. Years ago I had a Raid1 mirror that failed because the controller itself went bonkers, and both drives were accumulating errors. Luckily I was using mdraid and could recover their files by using testdisk [0] on both of them separately as USB drives on a different Linux machine. Was a really really long process; I pray the storage divinities not to have to live those couple days again. [0] https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

ChuckMcM 4y ago

That is a pretty niche laptop, I think the Framework folks are going more for the every day driver kind of experience. I've got a Framework 13 and really like it, it is, for me, a pretty solid Thinkpad replacement. But the real icing on the cake will be when I update the motherboard for an upgrade. (since it is relatively new I don't expect that to happen until maybe next year). On the Asus, are both screens touch screens? Or is only the lower screen a touch screen? I had looked at 20:2 type touch screens to do a sort of "media bar" setup on my desktop but didn't find anything at the time I could use. I'm wondering how well such a setup might work.

heavyset_go 4y ago

How's the battery life on it?