deeply embedded firmware always makes me kinda itchy,
Like, do /you/ know what the small ARM core buried deep inside your GPU die running firmware off a baked in mask-rom is /actually/ doing?
Or what about the small core inside your HDD or SSD?
Yeah, makes me itchy,
i think people should aim to learn as little about HDDs as possible. i honestly know enough about HDD data jenga to count as lovecraftian cursed knowledge.
like, between "the cache for your cache's cache" and "the nuclear SCRAM procedure of head parking" and "oh god these are still analog actuators at the end of it, tracks are a social construct" i just get queasy
if i ever get round to building a NAS it will be solid state even if on a rational level i know the 50ft house of cards inside every spinning disk amounts to something relatively reliable
i'm sorry but i cannot shut up about these vile machines
did you know that every time you write to a hard disk drive it subtly damages nearby data in a way that's not easily characterized (Adjacent/Far Track Interference) and any reliable HDD has to juggle maintenance routines to restore sectors that are potentially becoming unreadable
if you're unlucky enough to have bought a bottom-tier SMR hard drive it first has to uproot the entire stack of shingled tracks before it can get back to copying your Linux ISOs over from the cylinder where it temporarily wrote them because "Sequential writes are fast" (TM)
