Gay Eminem on 9/11

@DecayWTF

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computer

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Fun fact: Neo-Nazi dipshit cartoonist Stonetoss is in fact Hans Kristian Graebener of Spring, Texas

Gay Eminem on 9/11 @DecayWTF11/14/2022, 2:53 AM

frankie boyle's beanbag chair of death @micolithe

gravis again @cathoderaydude11/14/2022, 1:56 AM

m.2 is so close to being cool but i hate it

i was going to put this in a repost but decided i didn't want to be a dick and fill up the OPs mentions with my negativity

the thing that endlessly irritates me about m.2 is that, yes, we developed this brilliant storage form factor, but the only cool thing about it is that it's small. otherwise, zero thought went into it, and just like everything related to PCs, we refused to finish it, to make it an actual product.

m.2 drives should be in little vented plastic boxes like every non-PC electronics product made since the mid 70s, and there should be a little 1" tall plastic guide block on your motherboard with sockets in the bottom, at least four to six of them. You should be able to open up your machine and just plug an m.2 in like a USB drive, without touching the goddamn chips with your bare fingers, without needing a screwdriver. But instead it's yet another bare printed circuit board, because the PC refuses to acknowledge that it's not a mid-century minicomputer.

the m.2 connector is groundbreakingly terrible. they've somehow done worse than MFM, worse than ATA, worse than SATA. each of those connection methods was dumb, but m.2 is the crowning achievement to date.

there are so many problems with it. i defy you to explain why m.2 couldn't plug into an ordinary socket and stick straight up, requiring only a 1/16" x 1.5" footprint, instead of making a massive, 4x1.5" swath of your motherboard a no-mans-land that you'd really prefer not to park any cards over. (did I mention that almost the only card anyone ever installs these days is a gigantic GPU that, without fail, interferes with being able to reach at least one drive?)

why the fuck, and I'll renew my objection, why the fuck do you have to use a screw???????????? to hold m.2 down? have you ever installed one of these? ever watched someone install one of these? it's this absurd dance of surgically navigating your (hope it's magnetic!) screwdriver down to the standoff, unable to hold it on because the drive socket is SPRING LOADED (??????????), and hoping that you don't drop the microscopic screw onto the board.

you can install a SATA drive while your machine is running, in total safety, I've done it many times. I'm sure there's no reason m.2 couldn't be hot swappable, except that there's too much risk of dropping the screw????? onto the board and shorting it out.

a screw??? a fucking screw??? is this a PDP-8? is it the 60s? what is a screw doing in there? if this was anything except a pc peripheral it would be retained by a spring catch. we had this kind of problem figured out 40 years ago.

how about cooling? do you really want me to believe that it's thermally optimal to have these laying against the board, struggling to catch a little bit of heat dissipation through their heatsinks (a clear admission of defeat which make it even more tedious to swap drives), instead of standing up where they could be right in the airflow, catching it on both sides? i refuse to accept that.

on top of all this, because m.2. uses this absurd mounting strategy where it lies against the motherboard, you're basically hard limited to four ports, and most likely you only have two. it's so regressive! it's so goddamn regressive!! plenty of ordinary consumer SATA boards had six or more ports, and you could install cards with like twelve or more if you wanted. we had a decade of motherboards with virtually unlimited connectivity, and now if you want to plug in a single extra drive, get ready to lose an hour of your life.

if you actually have a free slot, you'll have to take apart a good chunk of your machine (monitor cables, GPU, cabling, maybe even water cooling lines since AIO coolers are so commonplace now) in order to get to it. if not, good luck with whatever $10 pcie adapter you get from amazon. hope the rando no-name manufacturer used a robust connector! hope you have a free pcie! hope your motherboard allocated enough lanes to that slot! hope it doesn't run into your massive GPU that renders half your slots unusable!

every single PC interconnect that comes out is stupider than the last. i hate all of them, and i always have, and i can tell that I always will. the designers need to go to jail.

#computers #the decline #gravis-mediumposts

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

colin @vogon11/14/2022, 2:02 AM

good luck with whatever $10 pcie adapter you get from amazon. hope the rando no-name manufacturer used a robust connector! hope you have a free pcie! hope your motherboard allocated enough lanes to that slot!

the best part is that since M.2 is just a PCIe x 4 connector with a different form factor, this is a problem that exists on many motherboards even with the standard M.2 slots -- if you plug an M.2 drive into a particular connector on your motherboard, it might rob 4 lanes from one of your big PCIe slots and cause it to drop down to x8 speed, and this will usually be documented in an extremely confusing table somewhere 50 pages into your motherboard manual and nowhere else

gravis again @cathoderaydude11/14/2022, 2:04 AM

and absolutely nobody talks about this. if you actually use Every Part Of The Animal, you find out that most PCs are dog fucking slow. it's so bad that someday I'm going to rebuild my desktop using a server board solely because they will make hard promises about how many lanes you get: all of them, on every slot and every USB port, simultaneously.

walking mirage @atomicthumbs11/14/2022, 7:07 AM

my old maximus vii gene only gave me four lanes if i left both a particular pcie slot and the mpcie slot at x1

gotyaoi @gotyaoi11/14/2022, 2:07 AM

I assume the answer to most if not all of these questions is "they were meant for laptops and escaped into the wild"? Flat because laptops are flat. Screw in because "why would you open a laptop?" Takes up PCIE lanes because that's the system integrator's job to deal with.

gravis again @cathoderaydude11/14/2022, 2:13 AM

that's probably where they originated, but it's like... using a travel iron at home? nothing made them use the same connector or fix them in place the same way, all that could have been adjusted when they brought them over to desktops

gotyaoi @gotyaoi11/14/2022, 2:17 AM

Changing anything would have cost them more, so why bother when they can just say "it's the new standard." OEM's probably love them for the same reasons that laptops would use them, and hobbyist builders have always been a tertiary market unless you're selling graphics cards.

To be clear, not saying this is a good thing, just... capitalism, as ever.

gravis again @cathoderaydude11/14/2022, 2:22 AM

oh yeah, you're entirely correct, because it's always this explanation. my post violates my own rule against complaining about shit with an obvious answer

Just Another Apocryphal Mess @apocryphalmess11/14/2022, 2:16 AM

Having recently worked for a laptop company, this is basically it. M.2 is a descendant of mSATA, which was based on minPCIe, which was absolutely a laptop (or ultra-small form factor dekstop) thing.

The U.2 spec is really more appropriate for desktop PCs, but it proved cheaper for motherboard manufacturers to just use the same M.2 sockets they were already using for the OEM laptop boards they make, so here we are.

philosophy major (derogatory (reclamative))@nullpat11/14/2022, 2:27 AM

I’ve installed one in a desktop that felt like it was going to snap getting it in the slot, and one in a laptop which went fine but I can’t help compare it to the generation of macbook that just let you slide the hard drive out of a slot in the side of the battery compartment. which the m.2 form factor looks like it should be perfect for!

colin @vogon11/14/2022, 3:27 AM

yeah I just helped a friend of mine build a PC to replace her old machine that she's turning into a NAS box, and the motherboard in her machine came with two different thicknesses of thermal pads, one of which you're supposed to use if you're mounting an M.2 drive with chips on one side and the other of which you're supposed to use if you're mounting a M.2 drive with chips on both sides

I mounted it, triple-checking that I was using the right thermal pad, and noticed that the drive was visibly bowing under the pressure from the heatsink

after we installed the M.2 drive it worked great for about three days, whereupon it disappeared from the list of installed devices and refused to come back

removing the stock heatsink and reseating the drive fixed the issue and I told her "okay just get an aftermarket M.2 heatsink and slap it on top of that drive"

the magic of technology

philosophy major (derogatory (reclamative))@nullpat11/14/2022, 5:31 AM

I think if I had to deal with thermal pads and heat sinks my computer would have caught fire by now

Michaela Sue @beige-alert11/14/2022, 2:15 AM

Last time I installed one, well, that was the framework laptop and the screw was included, but the time before on a desktop was there a little screw in the motherboard waiting to be used? No, of course not, had to order tiny screws from Amazon... My other motherboard has one flat slot and one that does stick up, but you need a special bracket to hold the little m.2 card in the vertical position and they don't actually sell them, so it's useless...

all I want for christmas is None @zephyrmoth11/14/2022, 2:28 AM

There are toolless mechanisms but it's not part of the standard so basically every motherboard manufacturer has a seemingly proprietary method of doing it.

cthuflu @cthuflu11/14/2022, 2:29 AM

There are two directions that the last motherboard I installed one on went:

It addressed the issue of the screw by having it be a sort of rotating latch that defaulted to being installed for full-size m.2.
It then tried to address half-size m.2. by having an entire page of the manual dedicated to uninstalling and reinstalling the latch in the shorter position.

Additionally, two of the three slots on the board were under heatsinks; one of which is refused to be recognized despite no labeling showing that slot as being anything special, other than some vague switch in the BIOS that had no discernable effect.

Peter Hosey @boredzo11/14/2022, 2:46 AM

I've personally run into the thermal aspect, with external M.2 SSDs in USB-C enclosures. I wrote a parallelized fast drive copier that drives mass storage devices as fast as they can possibly run, and on certain SSDs, that means that it goes into thermal throttle and you get maybe 10–20% of the rated throughput until it cools off. Sometimes pointing a desk fan at the thing helps; sometimes (depending in part on ambient air temperature) it doesn't.

Xylaria @Xylaria11/14/2022, 3:32 AM

I could not possibly agree with this more.

Every person who went into the design of modern motherboards should be arrested and charged with crimes against computing, and then we should go back to the drawing board and do it again, right. Make all the components nice and modular and reasonably-sized and able to be held independently in cases and have comfortable airflow and breathing room and not require magnetic screwdrivers and tiny fingers to press down clips and whatever other bullshit because computer building is stupid.

Annie D @ann-arcana11/14/2022, 3:48 AM

why the fuck, and I'll renew my objection, why the fuck do you have to use a screw???????????? to hold m.2 down? have you ever installed one of these? ever watched someone install one of these? it's this absurd dance of surgically navigating your (hope it's magnetic!) screwdriver down to the standoff, unable to hold it on because the drive socket is SPRING LOADED (??????????), and hoping that you don't drop the microscopic screw onto the board.

This feels so wrong every single time. It is the first time in decades where installing a component in your machine the right way feels so much like you must be about to break it.

Like those weird off-angle SIMM slots from back in the day where you could be putting it in wrong and about to snap your RAM stick ... or it could be just fine, and the difference is so minute that you might not be is down to which snapping sound you hear.

videogames is one word @psilocervine11/14/2022, 6:27 AM

Also, depending on the setup you've got, it might just go "thanks, buddy!" and leave you with two less available SATA slots on your board because it'll just be occupying those lanes. Usually this information is buried deep in the manual in a single off-hand sentence too, so you might just boot up after installation and discover that, hey, your media drives just vanished!

Froey @froey11/14/2022, 8:48 AM

I built my new machine recently after using the same one for ten years and installing the m.2 drive was probably the most stressful part of the build.

Having to line it up correctly, shoving it in as hard as possible thinking I'm about to snap it, and having to undue the thermal tape for the heatsink to only not get it on there straight. Gah.

Yeah, it's a fast drive. Be nice if it was as simple as plugging in a USB c device.

hk @hindsightee11/14/2022, 9:56 AM

Not mentioned in the post: the nightmare that is M.2 keys.

See, M.2 is not just a PCIe x4 connector in a smaller form factor - that's only if we're dealing with M.2 SSDs. M.2 also may support:

SATA (usually in the same slot as PCIe SSD, but not always)
I2C/SMBus
USB 2.0 or 3.0
I2S audio or PCM audio
SDIO
Serial port
DisplayPort
Inter-Chip USB

To fit this zoo of protocols on fewer lanes than can support them, PCI-SIG created module "keys" - some pins on M.2 connectors are notched out, some pins on the socket are blocked out, so you can't insert a module into an electrically incompatible socket. For example, on Key E you may get 2 PCIe x1 slots, USB 2.0, I2C, SDIO, UART, and PCM (This is usually for GPS modules or WiFi). On Key M, you get PCIe x4, SATA and SMBus (this is the key usually used by SSDs). A module with a certain key may use any of these protocols, but isn't required to. A socket that's compatible with that key may connect any of those pins, but isn't required to.

You might notice that this is not a very user-friendly design: you can very easily plug an M.2 module into an M.2 slot and have it not work at all, because, for example, this is a SATA-only slot into which a PCIe SSD has been inserted. It works a lot better for embedded platforms, where it's par for the course to buy 20000 LTE modules and build your baseboard to connect to their mess of USB/UART/I2C/custom reset pins (as I did for my job at one point). For PC building, where you buy off-the-shelf components and try to fit them together, it's a nightmare.

This all comes to a head with M.2 WiFi/BT modules: while one will typically work in your PC if installed there by the manufacturer, sourcing a replacement or trying to expand your motherboard with one is a grueling process.

Notable difficulties:

There are, to my knowledge, no bluetooth chips that work over PCIe. ("Yes there are! I saw a bluetooth chip on a PCIe card yesterday!" - check again, there's a USB port on that card so that bluetooth will work). This includes WiFi+Bluetooth combo chips: instead of making Bluetooth another PCIe function, it will have WiFi work on PCIe and Bluetooth work on USB. This means that you need to guarantee your M.2 WiFi slot has USB connected to it before you buy a card, or you will lose half your functionality.
Some Wi-Fi chips don't work over PCIe either, using USB or (shudder) SDIO instead. You bought a module without a datasheet from a retailer? Good luck!
Intel is just blatantly breaking the M.2 spec on some modules, using neither PCIe nor USB but a secret third thing (CRF). For a CRF module to work on your PC, your CPU must support it, and your motherboard must have traces to it.
Even if you only want Wi-Fi over PCIe and you bought an appropriate module and sourced an antenna you can put on the backside of your PC, you will not be able to insert a WiFi module into an SSD slot, because they are keyed differently and the PCIe pins are in different places. You have to buy a motherboard that has WiFi already to insert your WiFi module into it - or you can buy a dodgy PCIe to M.2 Wi-Fi adapter, in which case, you could've just bought a PCIe Wi-Fi card in the first place.

There's also a branding issue: could you guess that M.2 Socket 1 supports "Key A" and "Key E", M.2 Socket 2 supports "Key B" and "Key C", and M.2 Socket 3 supports only "Key M"? Did you even know that any of these terms existed, much less how to distinguish them on a motherboard? Neither did I, until I got the M.2 specification from my employer!

christ, i wish they went with U.2 for storage and something entirely distinct for WiFi, so I'd never think of this again.

arrjay @arrjay11/14/2022, 4:17 PM

I have been fortunate in that the only m.2 install I have in not a laptop is via a PCIe card (a single drive, because anything more complex is also awful!) and yeah, this form factor is borderline user serviceable at best. I wish it had stayed in laptops, and u.2 or sata express was, like, not enterprise gear.

that idiot who has bad opinions on things @daemonspudguy5/20/2024, 10:30 PM

Coming from nearly 2 years later (I think) but I have another thing to add that's even more insane: even a lot of DDR RAM sticks come in a covering to hide all the chips so you don't touch them. M.2 is a worse form factor than DDR. That's embarrassing.

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