HGST (now owned by WD) never seemed to acquire a bad reputation. Always top of the charts in Backblaze's drive statistics. Longest warranties. I was sad when they got bought. Their factory still seems to produce better drives than WD in general, as of a couple years ago.
IBM drives were almost perfect :) I still dont know what the problem with Deskstar GXP was, were those firs IBM drives with Hoya glass platters? After fixing this one problem they became the best drives on the market under Hitachi.
Sorry, I should have included the qualifier recent.
Western Digital has had several recent high profile data loss issues
Of course you won't find a storage vendor with a spotless history, but Western Digital flash devices are spontaneously failing in the past 2 years and there's no solid indication that they've actually fixed the root cause in the affected products.
I don't know the implementation details of this specific StarTech dock, but other Thunderbolt docking stations (like the HP USB-C Dock G4) have a PCIe NIC which supports PXE booting.
It's the same implementation as an internal NIC connected over PCIe, the NIC firmware contains a PXE option ROM that the host runs during boot.
> Is it just part of UEFI?
Yes, sort of. It's the same way PC firmware has been supporting option ROMs of PCI(e) devices since the BIOS days.
> Apple might be left with the maintenance burden forever but no real prospects for a mainstream product.
This seems unlikely. Apple has not hesitated in the past to exit market segments they felt did not suit them. To name a few: servers, displays, routers.
> “People are coming in to do occasional big meetings, but really the rest of the time, they want a quiet private spot to get on a Zoom call,” said Witting, a partner at the company. “It’s weird.”
It's not weird. Before we had open concept hellscapes, and the cubicle farm, people had actual offices. Four walls and a door you could close.
WSJ seems to have the memory of a goldfish if they can't hark back to a time before offices became a free-for-all for noise pollution.
Surprise, surprise, people want a quiet private space to do most of their work, and will gravitate toward those [limited] spaces in a modern office.
In my experience, 90% of the modern office was never fun. It was finding a floating desk, putting on noise cancelling headphones, and trying to ignore the constant interruptions to do your work. The only fun part was socialising during lunch/coffee with colleagues, but the rest of the experience was a huge net negative.
The culture of the company has to match the culture of the space. If focus is important it needs to be in the physical design of the space and the culture it supports.
I don't know if newsrooms started open concept but they had it easily for a long time.
As a design, "open concept" in part was less construction costs and more profit for the lease.
Of course, it is pushed as being open/collaborative/innovative. It was an innovative way to openly oversee collaboration, or whatever the acting required to look busy was. :)
> Before we had open concept hellscapes, and the cubicle farm, people had actual offices
It is true, but the move to cubicles and in the end open halls was necessary because rent in prime employment centers of the world has gotten so high, and companies seem to be requiring ever more people and we cant afford to give everyone an office nowadays. Modern office is definitely better in some ways socially, I dont think you will be really motivated to go to work if all you had was one room to sit and close the doors to not see anyone. These days, You have more people to talk to if you want and sometimes its a good and safe environment to discuss things. If I had to sit in an empty room to work and then it wouldn't be any different than working from home.
> I dont think you will be really motivated to go to work if all you had was one room to sit and close the doors to not see anyone
You're describing an office like it's solitary confinement. I'm describing somewhere where you have the option to choose silence and solitude, not the obligation.
> and sometimes its a good and safe environment to discuss things
And the rest of the time? A free-for-all for managers trying to build their own fiefdom-- sorry, "team."
> If I had to sit in an empty room to work and then it wouldn't be any different than working from home.
Which is precisely why so many people are resisting the RTO mandates. Not only do they have a pointless commute after working for years remotely [1], but the office they're coming back to is not even an empty room, it's an open-plan office with all of the downsides I described in OP.
> The Fujitsu ones have D3417(-A!) boards (not -B) having proprietary power supplies with 16 power pins (no 24pin ATX but 16pin). There are Adapters on Aliexpress for 24PIN to 16pin (Bojiadafast), but this is a bit risky - I'm validating that atm.
They work just fine. The pinout is well known [1]. You can also adapt a normal ATX PSU if you boost 5VSB to 11V.
Fujitsu boards are great, and very inexpensive to purchase in the EU. Someone has even reverse engineered the license for the KVM features of their remote management (iRMC S4/S5) [2]
Oh this is pretty interesting, thank you very much. You mean that the Bojiadafast adapters work fine?
If so, I wonder if there is a hit in efficiency because of the required step-up / step-down converters in that adapter.
However, on my board there seems to be an unsoldered 24pin connector, that could be just used as is with a little soldering, but since it is on-hold my replacement system if my ...-B variant dies, I'm not willing to risk too many experiments :-)
> You mean that the Bojiadafast adapters work fine?
I have no experience with this particular vendor/brand but the adapters are not complex. If you're concerned, verify that it has 11VSB before you plug it into the motherboard. Otherwise it's entirely passive (passing through PS_ON#, PWR_OK, and 12V)
> If so, I wonder if there is a hit in efficiency because of the required step-up / step-down converters in that adapter.
It should be quite nominal. The boost converters have a very high efficiency (>85%) and standby power is typically below 10W max.
Cool thank you... I also thought about soldering a 2$ female 24pin plug to the spot where it is on the (-B) variant... seems that they just left the plug out but the connections are there.
Chromebooks still do this, they just swapped the write-protect screw for disconnecting the battery [1] or using a special closed-case debug (CCD) USB-C cable (which was discontinued and is now neigh impossible to buy). You can DIY your own though [2]
Well.. yes but don't re-encode audio from Youtube to MP3, that's adding further quality loss to already not-great quality files. Download AAC or OPUS or whatever it's serving now.
> it would be nice if Android phones had a comprehensive whole-phone backup feature, though
There is, or I should say, was a way to do this: adb backup
Unfortunately, for "security" reasons, nearly every app developer (Google included) opts out of it in the app manifest, completely nerfing the feature. [1]
We live in a truly terrible timeline where the infrastructure to do what the author describes exists and has been there for years, and yet has been made functionally useless by user-hostile policy choices.
Google's incentives are also opposed to allowing users to take an offline backup of their apps and app data, because now they're able to sell more cloud storage for your data.
It boils down to effort/cost vs value.
We disable all kinds of backup data on our android app, including local favorites (should be backed up imo) and auth data (should not be backed up). It's just a hassle to implement, handle, maintain, test and no one ever asked for it.
We had it enabled at some point but then had a bug only occur when a user was restoring data from a backup, crashing the app instantly on start. Of course then it gets decided to completely disable it, instead of spending say 1000€/month to maintain/test this feature 'noone' wants.
If you can install alternative OS, you have your bootloader unlocked. If you have your bootloader unlocked, you can install magisk. And with magisk, you own your device, not some corporates - so you can back up any data you want.
Western Digital has had several high profile data loss issues across multiple product lines: Western Digital SN850 [1], SanDisk Extreme [2].
Western Digital's response has been very PR and not at all helpful toward the people who have lost data due to the faults in their products.
Storage products have one job: reliably store your data. WD has shown lately that you roll the dice if your choose their products.
[1] https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-wd-black-sn850-sudde...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds...