I’m ridiculously excited. After being held up in customs for a few days, my FW16 DIY Edition (no GPU) has finally arrived. Unfortunately, I’ve got the rest of the workday to finish before I can get started.

For “vitamins”, I grabbed a 1TB SK Hynix P31 Gold m.2 2280 (still deciding what 2230 to get) and 32GB (2x16GB) of G.Skill Ripjaws DDR5 CL40@5600. I haven’t had anything so modern in decades and am incredibly excited to see what fun I can get up to with so much RAM.

First order of business, after doing hardware tests to ensure that nothing needs an RMA, and updating any firmware, is to install my NixOS base system and get it setup as a QEMU/KVM hypervisor so that the real fun of trying out the list of recommended and esoteric distros that the Linux community suggested can start. Once I get bored of that, it’ll be time to start designing the parts to transform the machine into a hardware hacking/tinkering cyberdeck.

What are you folks doing or planning to do with yours?

  • nickwitha_k (he/him)OP
    2•7 months ago

    I tried don’t yet have a 2230 (smaller one) drive, so, not sure whether the one for that drive is captive. For the 2280 (standard M.2), the screw was not captive on my motherboard.

    • @mx_smith
      2•6 months ago

      I made another post as this is looking like and RMA as I feel like to get to the bottom of the logic board may require more disassembly than I’m comfortable with. Like ungluing batteries.