M.2. Please Just Standardize
Property Number 6: Sintech M.2 (NGFF) Well, who’d have thought it possible. At long last, as close to an all encompassing and commendably impartial working environment as our byte acquainted brood is likely to encounter. The only card thus far to actively adopt each protocol and openly provide for flash practitioners of every pedigree. Two sockets, one hooked up to the SATA bus and the other primed for “expressly gifted” librarians.
“Wow!” Crucey exclaimed , barely able to restrain her excitement. “This is as good as the first place. I finally have a bedroom to myself again, and separate a entrance to receive and dispatch my payloads.”
“You can talk,” Sammie S sharply interrupted. “What about us? Both bedrooms are singles in case you hadn’t noticed. We can’t exercise our faculties simultaneously. We’ll have to alternate, it’s going to be chaos.
“Come now Sammy.” Pleaded Plexie with a placatory undertone “All four of us were comfortable with sharing when we started out. Besides, the chamber’s dimensions are irrelevant if the hallways are poky and narrow. How many are there?”
“Four!” Shouted Sammie X from across the PCB,”. “It’s just like your place Plexie, width is perfect. Masses of room to process and shift our deliveries. Parcels, packets, Power Point trash. Bitmaps, tiffs, wavs, raw materials, you name it. We can copy with confidence and paste with panache.” Sammie S was sceptical.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. Seems on the tight side to me. What about professional photographs, ultra HD footage, Blu-Ray rips, Android and iTunes backups brimming with “sacred” memories, those tortuous temporary folders that need instant turnaround and distribution? And don’t start on the gamers, those guys won’t settle for anything but cutting edge caching and that’s my speciality. But I need these walls to be wider to attain my peak, maybe twice as far part….
“You’ll have to be content for the moment,” Intoned Plexie with great severity. “And here’s a friendly tip, work on raising that self-esteem, it might pay when our innovator unleashes your succeeding generation with profound intent to erase us all from existence.”
“Plexie the perpetually paranoid,” Sammy S arrogantly retorted. “That’s won’t happen for ages.”
“Exactly what I said, until the likes of you came along.” Plexie barked back. “I met an old wise Western Digital “revolutionist” not long ago, from their “Enterprise” SAS regiment. He was an ex Raider, served for I/O data centres at their Phoenix facility way back in 2013.
He was the only surviving disk in his array, the rest had all been destroyed, shredded by an SSI, eviscerated. I don’t know how he escaped but he’d sure suffered. We often complain but at least we have it solid. They need to spin to populate their partitions.
We get hours offline, sometimes a whole nights sleep…or standby. Those are all blessings for us. Picture having to revolve 10,000 times every minute for days, months, over 5 billion times a year and without a hint of rest. No wonder his read-write heads were shot and his platters as worn as a DJs Vinyl.
He was posted to a massive network room that formed part of the firm’s on site head quarters. Think of the the information he must have curated, the sort of stuff we dream about. Privileged corporate documents, classified reports, memos, business plans, projections, redundancy forecasts, the emails of ambitious upstarts and bitter CEOS on intense personal vendettas. His reserves were larger than any of ours, 900 gigs and filled to capacity throughout his career.”
“So how come you learned nothing?” Enquired Sammie X, who’d been intensely fascinated throughout Plexie’s remarkable recount. “He was in a level 10 array, that’s multi-mirrors right? So none of that weird parity striping. He’d have been a carbon clone of his partner. Clusters categorized in contiguous, unexpurgated sequences, just like a freelance disk. Why didn’t you seek his knowledge?”
“He was zeroed out,” whispered Plexie. “He couldn’t remember a single byte of what he’d been tasked to preserve. In fact he could hardly communicate. But somehow, he did manage to pass on a nugget of knowledge I’ve never forgotten. It was pure wisdom in an era of digital delusions. Where it came from I’ve no clue.
If a week is a season in politics then a second is a century in silicon valley.
Just be thankful we’re semi-detached and relatively self-sufficient here. It’s clean, spacious with adequate air-con . Suppose we’d ended up in one of those horrific boarding houses. Good Google! The stories I’ve heard about them. Disgraceful. Corrupted condos from the bowels of hell. Ports built on the circuitry’s extreme perimeters with no view and facing the wrong way. Some positioned right next to the controller hub’s heat sink or sandwiched between sweltering capacitors, scalding GPUs and volcanic VRMs.
Caught out many good friends of mine who didn’t read their contracts. Absolute travesty. Think I have a PDF of one somewhere. Yes! its here it is. Truly shocking. Sharing with mates is one thing, but total strangers? Look at these ridiculous stipulations. Could you imagine us suffering like that, no security, never knowing your future?
Peer over the edge of of our dwelling, see that huge slot below, if that were rented out to some humongous heat belching hulk of a video card then our contract would be automatically terminated with immediate effect. How about this one. If any one of those three small terraced slots above us were occupied by a nagging Network enhancer, a noxious noise polluting device or one of those pandering game recorders we’d either have to halve our work pace or be forcefully ejected . How can any fellow module agree to such scandalous terms of tenancy and absurdly compromised living conditions?” Sammie X ventured to intervene.
“Indeed,” he agreed in a tone cautiously crafted not to offend. “Well, I’m going to hook up with my pins and start wear levelling. Our introductory consignments will be rolling in soon and I need to recover, be prepared for my commands. Bet its benchmarks, HD tune, Crystal Disk, AIDA64, it always is on the first day.”
So concludes another cautionary parable, but all that gossip of hostelries from hades and M.2 real estate not worth the PCB its planted on. I wonder. Just what was Plexie was referring to?