I am a Computer Hardware professional. I started working with computer technology in the early eighties. I have seen the evolution of technology starting with closed platforms like the game console era and then the move toward open platforms like the Home Computer Golden Age. In the last 5 or 10 years, I have witnessed technology changes that are slowly moving away from open hardware designs towards hardware that is locked down and can’t be modified by the user.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, as long as you don’t get the bottom of the barrel cheap ones. Also make sure you have enough power for the drives.
Awesome, thanks!
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.
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.
2.5" drives aren’t going away any time soon either, but they’ll mostly be the thick server drives.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/icy-dock-m2-hot-swappable-ssd-card
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Presumably the demand isn’t there, £1200 is a lot for a consumer drive and spinning rust is 1/3 the price.
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.
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.
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.
I’m still using the 5.25" drive bays in my computer…
spoiler
…to hold 3.5" drives, LOL
2.5in is rather common in servers these days.
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.
Wait, you’re swapping hardware to switch to a different OS? Why? Just make a dual boot system
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.
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.
Dual boot is a misnomer, you can put as many OSes on a disk as you like
https://www.howtogeek.com/187789/dual-booting-explained-how-you-can-have-multiple-operating-systems-on-your-computer/
And like your link says, you could even run them in virtual machines
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.