There are a lot of enterprise M.2 drives which have features not available to M.2 2280 form factor drives. I’ve searched high and low for one which has the features I’m looking for while having the shorter, more common 80 mm length, but they are non-existent.
I don’t really care about the SR-IOV or namespaces as those are overkill for a laptop. But the T10 DIF/DIX in combination with OPAL 2.0 would do wonders for data integrity and security (which are basic needs for a mobile professional), while not taxing the CPU like Bitlocker would (). The difference from a software-only solution like dm-integrity + dm-crypt is that the drive itself also verifies that the received data is correct, so errant data isn’t eagerly written, overriding good data, and not being discovered until the next time it and its checksum/hash is read—which could be a while later with the only good ephemeral copy of the data in RAM long gone; and that’s not a case which a backup would protect against.
I can’t get those features with plain old M.2 2280 SSDs. None exist on the market.
Of course, this would take a backseat to ECC RAM support. It’s the weakest link in reliability.
I haven’t seen a laptop support that size module ever. Now i could be wrong. But those modules supporting some of those features would require power that would cause battery life to be degraded. Most of those ssds are more for enterprise servers.
Edit: after more research the 1st one runs on 10-13v with up to 13watt usage the other 2 i imagine would be the same…where the sn850x is 3.3v 2a (~6 watt max)
Why would you want that on a laptop? There is a permanently on battery to do this for you, so why buy a module that has its own backup power supply (and hence the extended length for the power supply (presumably a supercap) and the associated RAM) to do this for you?
As others have pointed out, this and other features you list are largely for server use.
PLP just so happens to come standard with these kind of drives. I only want the T10-DIF and OPAL SED support, which is found only in the 22110 form factor.
The T10 lets me avoid the performance penalty of dm-integrity’s journaling, and the OPAL SED lets me avoid pushing the encryption workload to the CPU. I understand that software encryption is cheap enough to allow for performance indistinguishable from not using it as discovered by Cloudflare. I’m willing to part with OPAL SED, in which case there is exactly one M.2 2280 SSD which offers T10-DIF and it’s made by Netlist.
The only laptops I know about which ever supported 22110 were made by Acer—some supporting several 22110 M.2 SSDs. I think I can bear with the higher power consumption, but I’m going to give it a spin by hacking an Optane 905P into my laptop to get a feel for it. I’ve got a cavity big enough for it and I just need to sand off some internal plastic protrusions to ensure clearance. (The laptop is already out of warranty anyway, so I lose nothing with the modification.)
). The difference from a software-only solution like