268
Are PC Hardware Companies Slowly Driving Technology into Restricted Closed Ecosystems? (www.scottrlarson.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
83 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 30 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Can someone tell Scott that they added the driver for his laptop on November 29th? Almost a month before he made this post.

Further, from some light reading on the subject after searching around it sounds like since most stuff is moving to NVMe drives, Intel is indeed slowly removing ACHI from newer devices, which does mean you need those IRST drivers to boot and recognize disks.

I think it's less companies trying to fuck us over and a hiccup in the slow but steady adoption and adaptation of new technologies.

EDIT:

Here's the Intel Rapid Store Technology driver for the other PC he pointed out, too. This one was added in November 2023.

This seems like it's a non-issue and maybe this guy just doesn't know what the IRST acronym stands for?

Much ado about literally nothing. This is literally based on nothing but his own speculation based on his failure to find these drivers that literally exist and are available. Honestly should be removed as misinformation since both PCs he mentioned have IRST drivers available right now.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    most stuff is moving to NVMe drives,

    NO!!! GOD DAMMIT, NO!!! 2.5" SSD's JUST NOW GOT CHEAP ENOUGH TO BUY!!! NO!!!! FUCK ALL THIS PLANNED OBSOLETE CRAP!!! I'm going to keep buying SSD's, and I have a whole little system. It's like NES cartridges.

    I buy the big ones as the slave drives, and the little ones as the OS drives. And when I want to swap out, I just turn off my PC, swap out one hard drive for another, and pristo bingo blammo I'm on a tottally different OS.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Okay that's totally fine, SATA ports aren't going anywhere for a while. And you can always add more via PCIe cards. Just buy regular size boards and you'll be fine.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    No no, I mean the drives themselves. It's already hard to find smaller drives.

    Go try to find western digital blue 120gb 2.5" in new condition from a reliable seller who's going to still exist in a year, and isn't some ebay scammer.

    It's already impossible to find those. I fear if they move over to NVME they won't make 4TB drives anymore in a 2.5" ssd either. And then there's the whole issue of advancing the medium to made cards LARGER than 4TB.

    I got a good system set up. I do not understand why I had to mad scientist hack this thing together like this. Eventually I need a dremmel, because Dell makes their front cases stupid.

    But basically, I got inspired for this by my raspberry pi. I eject the sd card, I put a new SD card in, and the hardware is a totally different purpose. It could be a pihole. It could be a retro arcade. It could be anything. And with a quick swap, it's anything else.

    Well now I have that with an x86 board computer. But I need the drives to keep getting made.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    It look like Nvme riser cables exist, so your mad scientist approach should still be doable, but you would have to continue doing mad scientist shit.

    Nvme riser going to the front of the case, maybe even the top, and then get one of those rubber nipple nubs that exist for holding nvme drives in place, and bam, you can swap the drives pretty easily.

    Very niche requirement, but to each their own.

    You could just get one big drive and partition it to have multiple OS or whatever it is you need. Then pick which one you want to boot from when you start up. Did they get rid of that ability? I haven't messed with anything like that in years.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah, but that would go in the back of the PC. Mine is sticking out of a port that's meant to be used as the CD Rom tray. Mine has 2 of them, and the second one has always been abandoned. So now I pull the flap down, and I can stick it in.

    Also, there's no cables. You just insert the drive into the enclosure, and close the enclosure door until it clicks. All the wires are connected to the enclosure, not the drive.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I'm kind a excited about these NVMe PCI bays. I have a short-depth wall-mount rack in a closet for my networking gear, and I found I like having a "front IO" server chassis in it:

    However, I've never been able to find a chassis (even a 3U or 4U one) that had both front IO and external drive bays for hot-swap. But now we're at the point where I can finally achieve what I want by using the card slots for the drives!

    (Now I just need to be able to afford the cost.)

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Are those PCIe cards any good? Because I used up all the ones on my motherboard and I can fit more drives in my case.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    It's the same with NVMe, what do you mean.

    Have you ever opened a 2.5" sata ssd? half of the box is empty, it's just there so you can screw it to the case on the other side. I hope that form factor will die soon. We need nvme in m.2 format for everything small, and 3.5" for servers. 2.5" should disappear.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What they need to do is take that mostly empty 2.5" drive, and cram it full of flash chips. Why have we been stuck with 8TB as the largest consumer drives for a few years now? I can understand it a bit for NVMe due to the physical form factor, but there's no excuse for 2.5" drives. It doesn't seem that complicated. For example, all Samsung would have to do is take the 2.5" 8TB 870 QVO, double the number of chips in it, then sell it for twice the price. I'd buy one.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Presumably the demand isn't there, £1200 is a lot for a consumer drive and spinning rust is 1/3 the price.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Demand might be low, but on the other hand the cost to develop and manufacture a run of the drives may not be too high either.

    I do have to say the increase in flash memory prices haven't helped. A year ago I bought the Samsung 8TB drive for $300 (US). If they had a 16TB model for $600-$700 I would have bought it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    2.5" should disappear.

    NO! I JUST BOUGHT LIKE $600 WORTH OF DRIVES AND EQUIPMENT TO MAKE MY COMPUTER A FRONT LOADER!!! And I'm going to buy several 4TB drives in this form factor......just over the coarse of the next few years. Maybe like 10 of them in 5 years.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I don't said your devices will stop working, you misunderstand the whole conversation. Form factors change all time, I have here a 5.25" 8 MB HDD next to me. "Planned obsolescence" that I can't use a 30 years old component? You can hardly buy a motherboard with floppy or IDE/PATA ports. Do you also miss them?

    I mean, it's expected that new devices won't have all the old ports, like USB killed all the serial and parallel and other terrible single use ports, thanks god. You can always buy dongles, like, I have IDE-USB converter so I can still use my old devices. I recently bought a laptop IDE-m.2 converter, so I can use m.2 sata SSD in a Win-98 era laptop. Where is this obsolescence, I could work it around easily. SATA won't disappear, and 2.5" to 3.5" adapters are cheap as hell, as it's just a plastic frame.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The consumer grade 2.5" drives may be half empty, but the enterprise grade ones are mostly heatsink so they don't thermal throttle within a minute of heavy use. M.2 drives are way too small. It was fine for SATA speeds, but not for the PCIe 5 NVMe drives.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Wait, you're swapping hardware to switch to a different OS? Why? Just make a dual boot system

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You say "dual". Whereas I'm thinking more like.........20-30 different OS's. Maybe 50. Could eventually be 100. This may eventually sprawl across multiple PC's. I'm very early in my days of mad scientist swapping. I just made Linux Mint yesterday, and tonight I'm going to try all these:

    https://www.techradar.com/news/best-alternative-operating-systems

    Except for the ones that cost money. Plus, I like the idea of inserting cartridges like an old school NES. It's just satisfying.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    That sounds like a nightmare to manage and keep up to date. I would consider using VMs or some other method instead of trying to multiboot dozens of OSes across different physical drives and devices.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    It’s like NES cartridges.

    In the sense that the card edge connector plugs directly into a slot on the motherboard instead of being connected via a cable, M.2 drives are more like NES cartridges than 2.5" drives are.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Excuse me, Scoot Blickerdon, that would require people suffering technology struggles actually research their issues and do the legwork to fix them themselves.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I'm hoping your right. It's probably more nuance than a simplistic article. But it did seem like it was true at the time the article was written.

    It might be me but I'm finding the big companies like Dell are doubling down a bit on their property drivers and at the same time, other companies that are simply open souring everything, if just for the "free" bug/features the community is willing to add to their platforms. It's a strange duality to live through.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    I understand that but this article is literally nothing but his own speculation because he tried and failed twice to find drivers, one of which has been available a month before he posted this, and the other available over a year before he posted this. It's not malicious, but its misinformation based on fear-driven speculation about bad corporations. I fucking hate corpos too but this is dumb. We don't need to make shit up out of fear of bad behavior.

    This is literally already turning into an anti-corporate circlejerk because of a misunderstanding. It's kind of like when Bernie Sanders supporters at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 were completely convinced the Cisco WiFi routers around the arena were noise generators to drown out their cheers for Sanders. It's dumb and unhelpful and makes us look stupid.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent