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