The BC711 seems to benchmark better so I bought one from Ebay. And the adapter from an Aliexpress seller that offered delivery in 15 days!
Good point and I use that philosopy in laptops. It is hard to get good data on actual power consumption though.
True that. The only mention I've heard is the Kioxia BG4 relative to the BG5. There's a likely correlation to higher performance with higher energy consumption (at least within a PCI-E generation, though a quick skim of PCI-E gen 4 seems to indicate higher power consumption across the board). Beyond that, I just look at the volt/ampacity ratings on the nvme drives themselves to estimate what their theoretical max might be.
Both seemed to be brand new looking at SMART info. The PM991a runs much hotter from what I remember if that matters.
My experience with the used Tinys I bought is that Windows installs and activates no problem.
I have the opposite issue. I had Windows 11 installed and now i want to repurpose it for pfSense and i can go through the complete installation successfully but it will not boot pfsense. Instead, i still get a windows screen stating my PC needs to be repaired despite the fact that i wiped the NVme SSD completely and deleted all partitions before the pfSense installation. I am clueless...
It seems like the rescue partition was not deleted.
Did that, wiped all partitions, formatted the NVme to FAT32, reinstalled pfSense but it doesn't want to boot. I get error 1962, no operating system installed.
Well, installed Win11 before that flawless. the pfSense installer on a USB stick boots perfectly fine. I just need to figure out why the installation itself doesn't boot. I do see the SSD in my boot menu. I haven't exhausted all options but still, this is quite odd as i have installed pfSense on several other systems without a glitch.
Doesn't explain the lack of booting, but PfSense probably will not like the Realtek NIC in your Tiny either. OpnSense should work out of the box, you could at least give that a try and see if it will boot, then you have a good foundation to go back and look at pfSense. Plus you might like OpnSense better and come over to the light side.
Just curious what OpnSense has that would make it work with a Realtek NIC, when its based on FreeBSD just like pfSense? Does it have its own custom drivers for some hardware?
It includes newer drivers, yes. I installed it last week on a dual RTL NIC server and it worked out of the box. There is an re driver in the add-ons which you can add afterwards but it's not critical.
I would go to the relevant Lenovo forum on their site and ask for advice. I've found that you can often get an (indirect) answer from the actual system designers fairly quickly, and they've been pretty tolerant in the past of us asking about abusing features of "their" device.
That's genuinely surprising to me. I feel like even casually supporting things like this leads to more problems, especially if this spec was never intended to be supported.I would go to the relevant Lenovo forum on their site and ask for advice. I've found that you can often get an (indirect) answer from the actual system designers fairly quickly, and they've been pretty tolerant in the past of us asking about abusing features of "their" device.
