[GTALUG] desktop thoughts on Black Friday

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 03:57:03PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> Ewww.  I did not know that.
> 
> We do have a couple of laptops with sockets that support NVMe SSDs.  I 
> think that one actually has an NVMe SSD (one has a SATA drive in that 
> socket).  I've not noticed anything about this disk, a great state of 
> affairs.

I think any SSD is likely to require custom code to do diagnostics.
S.M.A.R.T. never really was.

> Somehow charging now involves negotiation (of voltage? of current?) and 
> this seems to require cables to have active circuitry.  That makes them 
> expensive.  Mind you, sometimes USB C cables are neither expensive nor 
> smart.

Well for the cable, if you consider a resister to be active, then yes.
The smarts are in the power supply and the device.  They connect at 5V,
standard USB, then negotiate using the USB-PD spec and agree to what
voltage and current the device would like, after which the power supply
changes the supply voltage and the device can power up fully and start
charging or whatever it wants to do with the requested power.  It works
great, and means you can actually have a standard shared across devices
like laptops and tablets and such for charging.  The connector is also
much better than any previous USB connector.  Maybe not as durable as
the USB-A but at least you don't always have to plug it in 3 times to
get it right.

> Or perhaps you are referring to cables that connect DisplayPort or other 
> odd things to USB C / 3.x.  These are necessary because new laptops have 
> fewer and fewer kinds of ports.  And fewer ports of any kind.

True they do like using the alternate mode on the USB-C ports to save
space (although it also allows for single cable docking stations which
is pretty handy).

-- 
Len Sorensen