[Discuss] Linux on laptops

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 12:08:21PM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Nov 2015 08:36:25 -0500
> Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> >   - SD cards are not terribly fast nor reliable--but how much should
> > I trust random "SSD"s that come with soldered in notebooks these
> > days? 
> 
> Are you serious? Somebody's soldering in hard drives (SSD or
> otherwise)? Who is doing this? How did you find out about it? Where can
> I get documentation about this?
> 

It all goes around...

You may recall that IDE disks, Integrated Drive Electronics,
were hard disks with most of the controller placed on a board on
the drive itself, reducing the IDE interface to, approximately,
a set of buffered and multiplexed connections to the ISA bus.

Eventually this became a carrier for SCSI and SCSI-like protocol
commands.

High performance SSDs are now being made so that they connect
directly to the PCIe bus, usually through a miniPCIe connector,
sometimes through a variant.

If the circumstances of manufacture are such that space and
weight restrictions are more important than repairability, the
producer may place an SSD directly on the motherboard.

It is more usual, however, to have the M.2, NVMe or other
PCIe-like connector available, since they are quite small.

-dsr-