Have people had success installing an OS and booting from the storage expansion card?
I’d like to install a vanilla OS onto one of these cards that I can set to default for when crossing arbitrary country borders.
Does, say, Ubuntu installed to a storage expansion card boot and run smoothly enough to pass off as a legit installed OS to some dumb customs official?
People do use the expansion card for booting. USB drives are not generally recommended as a boot drive since USB doesn’t have the same reliability as an internal drive, but that shouldn’t mater for your use.
Best to not assume law enforcement will be stupid, though. Better safe than sorry with people who have the potential to cause you various types of harm. I’d ensure they see nothing odd. Like no boot selection screen. I believe you can do that just through boot order with USB as #1. Personally, I’m perhaps overcautious, but I wouldn’t like the vanilla OS being on an expansion card where they could remove it.
Main OS encrypted, of course. Sensitive data separately done with plausible deniability hidden volume encryption if the governments are known to be hostile at all. Yeah, don’t like taking chances. Encryption is cute but some can and will force you to decrypt through inhumane means if they can see it present.
I keep Fedora 42 loaded on my one terabyte expansion card and boot from it regularly as an alternate boot OS when I need a clean environment to test something. The storage is quite fast and reliable. I have noticed no discernible delays in boot time compared to a local NVMe install (a 2-3s diff), and it has been working great for me for the last nine months.
Have at it! You can enter into the BIOS with the expansion card inserted, change the boot order, making the expansion card the first boot option, followed by your internal NVMe, save it that way, and then it will only boot the expansion card whenever it’s inserted, but then will fall back to the NVMe, otherwise.
Do note that I do not use Secure Boot, so your mileage may vary if you do.
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