Maybe this is a byproduct of cost savings decisions by replicating enterprise-grade hardware manufacturing design principles and using them to design consumer-grade technology.
Recently I received a Dell Inspiron 16 Plus 7640 that has options removed. The storage section had no setting to change to a non-raid option. Because OEMs install bloatware on their systems, I choose to install the OS clean, or in most cases, I need to clone a system from dissimilar hardware.
The default Windows Install won’t see the storage device when you try to reinstall a clean copy of Windows from media if you can’t switch the storage to “non-raid” without loading the driver manually. So I thought, ok I’ll download the driver from Dell’s support website.
But lo and behold, they don’t make it available. By the way, this is not just an isolated occurrence, in the last few years I have seen other Dell models driver listings without the RST driver.
I could pull the drivers from the factory OS, but, I’m sorry, that shouldn’t be required and its time consuming for me to have to do that.
If you have experienced this, let me know in the Hacker News comments. I believe that hardware manufacturers are slowly moving towards a model where you can’t customize the hardware you buy. I strongly encourage people not to purchase products and return products that don’t have the needed BIOS options and the proper drivers available for their hardware.
I’m thinking about getting a ThinkBook 16 Gen 7 (16″ Intel) Laptop as a replacement. I’m pretty sure that Lenovo Makes RST drives available or the BIOS options are as such I can customize the OS the way I want, if you know of a better model that is designed and released without these anti-competitive changes, let me know.