Got my hands on a Dell Latitude ON module. Turns out it’s nothing more than a 2 GB flash module that fits in a mPCIe slot and is wired to the USB lanes. Shows up as /dev/sdb.
I do have a couple of old laptops that don’t have a secondary SATA drive slot, but do have open mPCIe slots with USB lanes (no mSATA lanes). The Latitude ON module would allow for a dual drive system, albeit a rather crappy one. What would you put on a secondary internal drive if it were limited to 2 GB and USB protocol?
maybe a stripped down winxp installation, lol
I imagine it was put into your device as a recovery drive. So maybe Ventoy & a lightweight ISO of your favorite distribution?
This reminded me of my old friend DSL, had to check up on it. Didn’t realize they re-released it!
No longer at the 50MB size, but still 700MB would be great for a small OS on this odd piece of older hardware.
oh wow. they updated it!
There is Tiny Core Linux if you want something small like the original DSL.
It’s 2025, the EFF and certbot exists, but no https? Interesting.
Any who, thanks. I’ll check it out, but I’m a little bit turned off by the above.
I didn’t see any way if posting data, so I guess there’s not really a reason for them to use ssl. Their forum is using ssl at least.
Incredibly simple, free, and quick thing to add for user confidence. Doesn’t sit well with me they can’t be bothered, what else does that attitude apply to in the OS?
Oh DSL, I remember asking other kids in middle school how they knew Angelina Jolie had Damn Small Linux as an OS. Learned a lot that day.
Woah, core memory unlocked! As kids, we put DSL on business card shaped DVDRWs and kept them in our wallets. We could take them to the library and boot into DSL, bypassing the software security.
At the time, libraries had outrageously fast internet compared to home. I would plug in my ORB drive and write as much Napster to the tape drive as I could (2.2GB @ 5-8MB/second). I’m sure everyone there had the worst connections because of me.
Great memory for me, thanks! 🙏
Rescue partition?
A backup drive ? dotfiles (.config) ? /tmp /var/log /boot ? map it into your home for something temporary - Downloads ? Slow audio files ? If you like to tinker for fun: btrfs / bcachefs could perhaps utilize it for something, like automatically offloading unused/slow files to the slow usb ? Raid ? ;) Create a partition and let zram swap compressed unused memory pages to the usb partition (I think it keeps pages compressed now ?). You can also run ‘usb over ethernet’, so another machine can use it directly - not sure why tho ;)
On a side note. I still use one of my first usb 1.? drives with 32mb in my old router. 32mb is still 12mb more than my first hard drive, and it fits well with the small openwrt packages. It even has a little slide button to select ‘floppy drive’ mode and a physical ‘readonly’ mode. I wonder what the smallest/oldest usb stick people still use, are ?
I’ve got a 16MB MMC card that I use as an offline backup for my password manager database. It’s old enough that it uses SLC flash, so I don’t have to worry about data retention time.
Total tangent, but IMO this is the state of the art in data retention: https://superuser.com/questions/374609/what-medium-should-be-used-for-long-term-high-volume-data-storage-archival/873260#873260
Paperweight? Oh, wait - too small and light.
Swap partition?
Swap would probably destroy that thing. And be unbearably slow.
I agree with the others, a rescue partition type thing is probably the best option.
Back in my day, we had this feature on Windows Vista called ReadyBoost that took advantage of the low-latency of flash media to supplement our slow HDDs. I’m not sure if there was a direct replacement for this in the Linux world. There are filesystems that take advantage of faster tiers of storage, but different latency tier exploitation isn’t something that I know to be readily available.
Today, 2GB of USB flash is next to useless, but I would consider a homebrew rescue system to restore your backups and fix problems without needing to prepare an external flash drive.
Make a keychain out of it.
