I’m worried I’ll inhale it given how small it is. “Don’t sneeze! Don’t sneeze!”
Just kidding, but not really
Most motherboard vendors are working on versions of a tool-less slot latch, so the little screw that screws you may be history soon-ish.
Alas my last motherboard upgrade was last year, so, not in the market anytime soon.
There are retrofit solutions too, like the ASUS one, but honestly if it’s already in there, you are probably not touching it again for few years anyhow.
It’s got two M.2 slots, and I’m only using one…
I’ve seen in Dell or Lenovo(or both) desktops a plastic latch connected to the screw hole.
I actually bought extra screws just so I’d have them on hand. Doesn’t solve the problem of the screw falling out and “disappearing” into a case (at which point I often end up picking up the case and shifting it around until I can hear the screw and remove it) but it does save a little of the fear/stress/anxiety about losing a screw when it falls off your desk into the plush carpet, never to be seen again.
Get your SSD fast. Contamination just wiped out 6.5 exabytes of NAND in production, and you know what that means to prices…
Microsoft sure missed a chance to make a splash by not shipping a Microsoft Flight Simulator upgrade to use DirectStorage on launch day, given the load times there. (It’s the one game you can benchmark if you want to get into an internet argument against Stusser’s “Gen4 doesn’t matter” pronouncement. :) )
Will be interesting to see if it does make a difference there. Was it DLSS they were saying was on its way? I’m fine with the tech improving incrementally - gives you something to look forward to :)
Is DS a feature from 11 which is (somewhat?) porting back to Win10? That blog says …
“DirectStorage is compatible with Windows 10 devices, but [Windows 11 has the latest storage optimizations built in and is our recommended path for gaming].”
But the linked article from 8 months ago says
“With DirectStorage, which will only be available with Windows 11, games can quickly load assets to the graphics card without bogging down the CPU.”
Originally DirectStorage was announced before Windows 11 was, so MS just said Windows and since of course we all knew Windows 10 was the last version of Windows, it was obviously going to be on W10. Then they moved it to W11, and now yes, are going to support it on W10 too.
Remember W11 is just another W10 major yearly release with new branding, an updated UI, and a broken taskbar and start menu.
Also, as I understand it, a game will need to be specifically coded to take advantage of the feature. I wonder if this is something some games will be able to have easily patched in.
Neat idea. It didn’t occur to me that Microsoft could push hardware people for things.
I imagine that the PCs still using HDDs as their main drives are the cheap ones now, which probably means they’re barebones on RAM and CPU. Still, an SSD is probably the best bang for the buck improvement as it speeds everything up. Even if the PC needs to rely on page files to free up memory, it’s a lot faster with an NVMe drive than an HDD.
MS can push the hardware by making SSD a minimum requirement for Windows certification.
Can’t see it’s a good look to say our OS is now too demanding for pre-2010 hardware.
It’s not too demanding. It’s just slow. You probably wouldn’t have fun results running modern Mac OS X on an HDD (a regular one, not a Fusion one) either. But you’ll never know because Apple ditched HDDs for a reason.
Before I scrapped it, I installed the last supported version of Mac OS X on my 2010 MBP that had 8GB of RAM and a SATA SSD. And doing tasks such as upgrading OS X took around 20-30 minutes, which is really slow compared to much more modern machines. And that’s on an early SSD. It’d be excruciating on a (non-Fusion) HDD.
Ingredient vendors (Microsoft/Intel/AMD/Google/etc) have much more influence than you might think.
In this case, Microsoft is encouraging retailers to delist platter drives by increasing the sell-through incentives on devices with SSD boot drives. With the razor-thin margins retailers operate under, they are reliant on the incentives from Microsoft and others to make any profit on selling computers. Microsoft believes (rightly so) that the SSD provides a much better customer experience and shows off their product in a better light, so they’re flexing their financial muscle to force quicker implementation.
Source: I sell computers.
what’s a good place to look for the latest info on SSD brands?