If all they need are hard drives, maybe the entry fee is to have mom/dad/guardian buy a 250GB NVMe Drive. Bring your own drive sort of thing. You might also ping Canonical to see if they'd sponsor an Ubuntu install party. I assume they have plenty of bulk order branded USB keys to hand.
-C
On Tue, Sep 15, 2026 at 5:22 AM Matthew Campbell via Scale-planning < scale-planning@lists.linuxfests.org> wrote:
Lots of good questions, and I have personal experience with thousands of dollars of NVMes, and corporate experience with millions. Take my advice in light and YMMV.
What size/brand/speed USB drive should we go for?
Don't, there is no point any more, other than portability if you want to drop off a project to a client and even then just by a 2T thumb drive.
What is the minimum size given the above use cases?
That depends on the minimum size of your OS, and whether the laptops support a second card slot
What are good brands or what do we look for if we buy new?
I only use the latest 10k black NVMes and have not had a problem with them, but am not as experience with the bottom end of the market. My first few drives I tried to save money on and they ended up in the trash.
Is this the type of component we can ask people to donate from their
old hardware stash or should we try to acquire new? That depends on what experience you want the kids to have. IF you want their first experience with Linux to be crashes, or intermittent failures and data loss, or arguably worse seeing a grownup flailing to find the right drivers or settings (it helps streamline the installation class if we standardize) then go for it. Better would be find a cheap standard drive (below) and get a corporate sponsor.
Does it matter whether it is 2230 or 2280?
Only depends on whether the laptop slots are big enough and/or have the right mounting screw hole.
What are inexpensive sources of these drives?
I order mine on Amazon, but after Trump Tarriff what used to be a $600 drive a year ago is now going for over 2 grand. Small drives are on the outs, so you will probably be looking at around $40 on amazon for an OS drive, $100 if you want room for video editing. That is for a slow drive, the faster ones are more $$$.
Matt
Matthew Campbell Architect Lead, Office of the CTO
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On Mon, Sep 14, 2026 at 9:08 PM Lan Dang via Scale-planning < scale-planning@lists.linuxfests.org> wrote:
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@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 _______________________________________________ Scale-planning mailing list -- scale-planning@lists.linuxfests.org To unsubscribe send an email to scale-planning-leave@lists.linuxfests.org
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