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.
  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • MIDItheKID@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 days 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.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      2.5" drives aren’t going away any time soon either, but they’ll mostly be the thick server drives.

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        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.

        • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 days 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.)