Hi all
Turning to the SCALE fam for help. Tl;dr looking for volunteer to help with
TNG laptop activity or recommendations regarding NVME drives and USB drives.
TNG, SCALE's youth event, was offered about 30 Dell 35XX series laptops
without hard drives. It would be a cool opportunity to show the kids how
to install a hard drive and install an operating system. And it would be
nice to let the kids take them home and explore Linux and open source
applications.
If you want to help out with this activity/effort, particularly wrangling
the hardware and finding a cheap or free source of hard drives, please
email youth(a)socallinuxexpo.org and we can set up a meeting.
I havent taken apart a laptop in nearly a decade so I have some naive
questions.
These Dell laptops should take m2. 2230 or 2280 NVMe drives.
Is this the type of component we can ask people to donate from their old
hardware stash or should we try to acquire new?
What are inexpensive sources of these drives? Does it matter whether it is
2230 or 2280?
What is the minimum size given the above use cases? What are good brands
or what do we look for if we buy new?
Also, if we are just using them for workshops, do we even need a hard
drive? Could we just boot off USB?
What size/brand/speed USB drive should we go for?
Lan
PS our workshops usually just involve demonstrating open source software
like Inkscape or programming micro:bits or accessing web resources