True, every board has had a usb port right on it since forever. Why would you need to have a bulky unnecessary CD player? The interface is literally bundle with the product, and yet they choose an other one?
Because they can press a DVD for pennies while even a cheap crappy USB drive is going to cost a buck or so. Meanwhile 99% of the time people will be downloading newer drivers from the net anyway.
It's probably been at least a decade since I used a driver disk for anything other than a coaster, and I have optical drives available.
Or better: just let Win 10 do its thing and download the current driver in the background. I guess most people don't even know which motherboard devices they have drivers for - and that's a good thing.
BTW: don't try this with XP. It won't have network drivers to download them and it won't have USB drivers to use that stick.
BTW2: what's the data retention time on that stick? Usual consumer hardware has just 1 year, so pretty bad for archiving. And indeed, the music USB sticks in my car face some elevated temperatures during summer and start to have data corruption after ~1 year.
You must be buying some really cheap low end USB drives, or something else weird is going on. I have 4-5 CF cards in my Infiniti that still work fine and have been in there for 6 years or more now.
That said, i agree with the gist of your comment. No one should use USB drives for long term storage of irreplaceable data.
True, quality is key. I'm sure these drives from EVGA are pretty low quality. But it will get the job done.
As far as memory cards, I have to replace them in my dashcam every year or two. The rewrite cycles burn them out, even the high endurance ones from Sandisk and Samsung don't last more than 10k rewrites.
But other than continuous recording, nothing would thrash a memory card like that.
Also, in the summer, I'm sure the heat beating on the camera while they are constantly recording doesn't help the longevity either. NAND is a rough lifestyle.
NAND works by trapping a charge inside a cell. That charge slowly leaks out over time. The newer (smaller) NAND actually has more problems, as the smaller fab process means the surface area to volume ratio is larger (there's less charge inside relative to the surface area it can leak out).
So I'd expect old NAND drives like CF cards to retain data for a decade or more. The newer USB drives though are suspect, and may lose data after just a few years. (Basically the problem the Samsung EVO 840 ran into.) I suppose it doesn't matter so long as you can download the drivers from the company's website, and the company stays in business so the website doesn't disappear.
Heat shouldn't be a problem. It's not uncommon for SSDs to surpass 100C during operation. A hot car is a refrigerator by comparison. Warping of the plastic case would be a bigger issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hhdWwvh5kI
Ambient temp affects operating temp. For example, dashboard temps on a hot summer day when you first fire it up and the camera starts running, before the A/C has a chance to knock the temp down.
Anyway, the "doesn't matter since you can download" argument is really an argument for including no media at all. Why bother? I never install anything from disc. I haven't in years. Why would I install outdated drivers which they try to bundle with other bloatware? Stick a dollar bill in the box for me instead. Or 6 yuan, whatever.
Heck for the average user Windows Update will install WHQL drivers and that's enough. Still probably newer than whatever they tossed in the box.
Actually you are right most of the time Windows 10 the newer versions will load the drivers after the first boot for the ones it does not have in the ISO installer image. I just loaded 2 machines and within 10 minutes it had all drivers loaded and everything was up and running. The only thing I did was update the graphics drivers and Audio drivers.
My USB stick in my car has been in there for 2 years throughout summer and winter as well (Canada winter) and so far it has been working fine and it was a very cheap 32GB stick from The Source store (Radio Shack in the USA) I think I paid $9 for it...:)
Hate to break it to you but Win 10 doesn't have all the network drivers either. I've had a asus wireless nic forever and it is never found after I install win 10. I always have to dig up the Driver CD. New HW may also not be included. However Win 10 is pretty good at it even if you change MB it will usually at least boot with the driver from the dvd.
XP won't have network drivers by default, but USB 2.0 will work out of the box, at least if it's SP2. I've been using an external HDD connected by USB 2.0 to install drivers on fresh XP installs for years.
Although I doubt a ton of people will be installing XP on an H370 board. Even I haven't yet installed XP on anything newer than Sandy Bridge.
This isn't only about the money. You can't simply get online and grab the latest drivers if you haven't installed the chipset and network drivers first. A bit of a catch 22. Also, depending on which USB port you use, your stick may not work before you install some USB drivers.
I'm sorry, but if you're using some garbage hardware with such a random USB chipset that even Windows 10 doesn't have a driver for it, you should probably just quit computing, it's not for you.
He's not entirely wrong. What modern USB chipsets don't have at least basic out of the box support in Win10? Heck even BEFORE you install Windows, for that matter, for example in the BIOS for flashing. If you don't have at least one USB port that works, you have bigger issues.
Anyway, it's not hard to stick wifi drivers on a stick/external drive/phone/punchcards and get a PC online so you can snag drivers. If you don't have functional internet but still need a cutting edge PC, go into town and borrow some bandwidth, download most current drivers ahead of build time.
Can't talk of Windows 10 as I've never used it, but when I installed Windows 8.1 on an ASUS Z97 motherboard, it didn't know what to do with the Intel NIC, and needed to be given the drivers before it would do anything involving the ethernet port (thankfully I'd downloaded them to a USB stick firts...).
So here is a question for people then - how do you guys get your OS installed the if you're not using an optical disc?
Does EVERYBODY install via a bootable USB drive?
What happens if you don't have USB 3.0 drivers that are rolled in to the installation media?
Or does EVERYBODY else all just use PXE to jumpstart the installation of the OS onto their system? (and what happens if you don't have updated network drivers in your PXE install image?)
I haven't used a disc for OS media in years. Since the later years of Win XP I've used USB sticks and never looked back. There's no benefit to using a disc. They're more fragile, larger, require an optical drive, they're slower (even than USB 2.0) and noisier in operation.
Since these days you can very easily download the ISO from the MS website and put it on a USB stick using the MS tool why would you even bother with discs? All you need is an 8GB USB 2.0 or above and as you can see sometimes they're free :). And you can put the drivers on the same stick.
But again, that's only true if you have the boot mini driver integrated into the installation media's bootstrap.
That's not necessarily true, especially for USB, network, and video drivers.
I ask this question because I just deployed a SuperServer 6027TR-HTRF and also two HP Z420 workstations where trying to install Windows 7 in AHCI mode completely and utterly failed with a USB stick.
And I did the research online and tried to integrate the USB drivers into the install media and it still failed.
Ultimately, I had to downgrade the SATA ports performance from AHCI back to IDE-compatible mode in order to get the install to work and I also tried installing the AHCI driver after installation and upon reboot, it still failed, so it's staying in IDE mode.
And it works with any OS iso you download from MS (I used it with Win7, 8, 8.1, all versions of 10, and all the Server equivalents of these).
Unless you have a really non standard machine with an exotic USB controller that's not supported with standard USB drivers you're safe. And if you put all the other drivers in a folder on the stick in advance you don't have to worry about not being able to access the network or anything. Simply install all the drivers after OS installation and you're good to go even in Win7.
Just another thing that keeps EVGA legit. Considering even Microcenter sells 8GB flash drives for $4 not even on sale and 3 packs for $9.99, who knows how much EVGA gets these for in bulk...probably a dollar.
Why would they buy them? They could task someone to -make- them once. They design electronics for crying out loud. Even if they changed their mind, they could just as easily turn them around and sell them as EVGA branded sticks.
Why have any media? The only thing you *might* need is wifi drivers to get the system online (depending on your wifi card/chip). What person building their own systems doesn't have access to any media and another device? Heck even if I didn't I could download the driver on my phone, connect to the PC, transfer it over, boom.
Once the PC is online, you can easily download the other drivers yourself if you want the newest ones, or else just let Windows install WHQL drivers. A USB stick is a waste. I've probably thrown away hundreds of driver CDs. Go green, bundle no media. :P
Would be great to see a spot on the motherboard for storing this, so you don't have to worry about losing it. (Not that losing CDs wasn't also a problem, but... PROGRESS!)
Sticking drivers onto an EMMC chip on the board would be a neat idea (could even be updated when network-connected to a fresh re-install will always be on the latest version), but a non-removable storage device seems like a ripe vector for malware too. Sticking a drive on a DOM into one of the USB 2 header ports could be an option, but that is likely more expensive than the encapsulated-PCB style drive shown here.
The problem is that you'd then have the driver flash showing up as a storage devices on your computer 24/7; and explorer is already too crapped up with useless stuff MS has jammed into the sidebar.
One approach would be to put the drivers into the Bios. MS have an admittedly very dubious way to do that already. It's how Lenovo put a rootkit in there.
In fact the vendor wouldn't need to put the actual drivers into the Windows Platform Binary Table, just an exe file that knew how to download them from the server.
The problem with this is that they might decide to put some value added software into the download too. That would suck because even a clean install of Windows wouldn't be clean on such a system - the WPBT exe file would download all the value added stuff that people had paid the motherboard vendor to preinstall.
tl;dr - it could be done, but you'd better hope motherboard vendors don't start doing it. One of the reasons for building a PC rather than buying a prebuilt one is because you want to avoid value added software, aka bloatware.
It was a good concept at a high level, but as you said it was quickly abused by OEMs, plus said OEMs didn't do a very good job of securing their end of things.
The last thing I want is for retail mainboards to get such a feature.
Interesting idea. Would be cool if motherboards included a microSD slot by default and shipped with the drivers on a microSD card that's already inserted. That could be expanded to shipping a full work / rescue environment, Linux based, with a motherboard.
Don't people get their drivers on the Internet anyways? Of course when the bare OS doesn't have the driver for your network card that sucks, but other than that I don't see any use for the DVD/USB thumb drive.
And with nearly everyone owning connected smartphones, even that isn't such an obstacle as it was 15 - 20 years ago. I remember when I was waiting for gaming magazine CDs and DVDs to deliver fresh graphic card drivers, especially when it was the hacked, more capable version such as Omega for my ATI 9500 @ 9700 Pro. :D
If you don't have network drivers you won't be able to connect to your smartphones WIFI either. Or if you want to transfer via USB I think there's a certain company which doesn't allow its phones to do such simple things.
I remember the Dox drivers for nVIDIA back in the day! Those things were the best! Of course eventually the official ones would catch up, but it'd give you a boost for a long time, back in the day when that could mean a few FPS when trying to play Crysis.
Is noone else worried about a rewritable medium being included with all this now? Disks are write once, no tampering at the factory where its assembled, literally any employee at the packaging area can start rewriting these with any number of harmful software packages and you'd be none the wiser. Since its a motherboard its very unlikely you'll have AV installed before the drivers as well.
AFAIK, typically newer drivers and other kinds of software are code signed so Win10 will give you warnings and make it difficult for you to install if it's unsigned code or other code that has been tampered with. Signed software typically just requires you to allow it with a UAC prompt and shows the author of the software.
I'm not talking about bad drivers, I'm talking anything else they want to put on it that runs through the setup wizard when you first plug it in. you almost definitely won't have an antivirus, even if you do it won't be up to date because if you could use the internet the entire point of the driver cd is moot.
Apple's Mac's can update everything ... including the firmware and OS ... over the internet. Changing the media type isn't really progress, compared to Apple. Will Microsoft ever fix this? Probably not.
Comparing OSX and Windows on this front is completely apples to oranges (pun intended). Apple really only has a handful of possible hardware configurations to worry about and only from vendors they directly work with. On Windows you have a near infinite list of permutations, including companies that Microsoft has no official communication with. That and Windows has extensive legacy support, whereas Apple has been willing to draw lines in the sand.
Microsoft branded devices can also do this. All Surface updates, for instance, occur over the internet including firmware, OS and drivers. Many third parties also provide similar methods for their own hardware. Some publish such updates on Windows Update, but its up to the vender.
Here's an idea. Good motherboards now should have the ability to download the latest UEFI update directly through the UEFI interface. Why not add the ability in the UEFI interface to download specific drivers to a USB drive? That way they won't have to include any type of driver disk.
The bundled drivers are usually outdated by the time you take the product out of the box, and both Windows and Linux are pretty good about loading the needed drivers on their own.
ASRock has this option, although it requires the BIOS image to have the network driver and support DHCP with no proxy in the mix. Bearing in mind the low single digit percentage of people that are comfortable doing anything in the BIOS
Some HP Printers come with built in storage with drivers. You plug the printer into your USB port, it is recognized as a mass storage device, you install the driver, and then it transitions to a printer connection. Whats more; when you upgrade the firmware of the deivce, it also updates these built in drivers... granted, it also locks you out of being able to use 3rd party cartridges... win some loose some?
Still, would be sort of neat to get basic network and chipset drivers as a sort of on-board, BIOS managed storage device. Once you had that, you can download the rest of the drivers easily.
I've not used a driver disk for the last decade. The drivers on the CD/DVD are outdated the moment the box gets shipped to the retailers, so I allways download the newest drivers on a second PC and put them on a USB-stick to have the whole driver-package (chipset, ethernet, sound, GPU, DirectX, .Net, etc, etc ) ready for installation.
Ditto, can’t remember the last time I used a driver CD for anything. I’d generally download the latest graphics driver and network driver (if necessary) on another PC, then let windows find everything else.
I love this, Though I only ever really buy Power Supplies from them so i'll never see em. I have to give them credit for making what is really a small but extremely smart change.
Yes about time lets hope more companies start doing this soon. What would be even better is if it self updated itself when you plug it in if the system is connected to the internet and gets the latest drivers from the companies driver page for each product.
Finally! I've long wanted to see all optical media replaced at the point of sale, for instance why can we still not buy a blockbuster movie on some silicon instead of clinging to a redundant optical format? Albums could be marketed on a stick for laptop or otg users...surely some marketing department can see some value in that? Otherwise IMO Its just cost, and the will to be different stopping them now.
I never thought it would come from the tech world but im pleased to see first steps from any direction, thankfully EVGA dared to be different, well done them!!
because pressing 100,000 blurays is orders of magnitude cheaper than flash or mask rom, especially at the capacities of bd disks these days - iirc there's bdxl that goes up to 100gb/disk? good luck making that on flash for the same price.
Nobody is going to press Blu-Rays as there are too few users who have drives for them but they all have USB
I use Blu-Rays because I record my own and all of my computers have a Blu-Ray Burner in them
100GB Blu-Ray disks are pretty much worthless though as there is a huge difference between the reliability and speed of a 6X Blu-Ray and a 4X Blu-Ray
You should only buy 6X or higher Newer 50GB Blu-Rays are 6X (Verbatim) Older 50GB Blu-Ray discs and Newer 100GB discs are 4X
If you can afford a few M-Discs, you will find that a 6X M-Disc will record at the same speed as a regular 6X disc but the drive will access and read them noticeably better than regular discs
and never trust your burning software to tell you that the disc was burned correctly The only way to reliably tell if the disc is good is to copy the contents of the disc back to your hard drive without any pop-up error messages
I have never seen a disk verification to be reliable It always says the disc was burned without errors until you try to read it later
If I get a CRC or data cannot be read error when copying the contents back to hard disk after a burn, I immediately break the disk and do over
Another problem is Windows!
If you find that you get several bad disks in a row, simply "MOVE" the contents of your temporary burn directory to any other directory on your hard drive and burn it again
When you start adding files to a burn directory over a period of several hours or days, Windows has a bad habit of messing up the burn
Simply dragging the contents of the burn directory to any other directory will instantly sort everything out and like magic and the next burn will be good!
Don't ask me why though, I have no idea how Windows can mess it up that badly but it happened several times before I started moving the burn contents to a new directory before every burn and the problem disappeared instantly and permanently
Yes, 6.6GB for "motherboard drivers" is of course ridiculous. If they'd cut down the bloatware it should all easily fit on a CD again :-). Just for reference, a windows 10 ISO file is roughly 4GB, and that includes way more drivers than any single board would need...
Yes, My Current Windows-XP Backup with all drivers and basic software fits easily on a Re-Recordable Mini-DVD+RW (8-CM)
When copied to the 2nd partition of an SSD, Acronis will restore the full backup in 18 seconds with all the drivers or 9 seconds without the drivers
A Re-Writable DVD is durable enough for backups that require minor changes every 6 months or so
A 50GB Blu-Ray disk holds ALL of my Windows backups on a READ-ONLY disk to prevent malware overwrites
Windows-XP / 7 /8.1 and even Win 10 backups can all fit on a single disk along with the .WIM files to Re-Install Windows to Go if necessary and the original Driver software + other basic Utilites
I was wondering how it added up to that much too. Are they also including drivers for all potential GPUs/network adapters/printers you might connect? Do they have separate versions for all versions of Windows back to 3.1 on the disc, plus several flavors of BSD? Admittedly my desktop's driver archive is 2.91 GB, but over half of that is due to having saved multiple versions of Radeon and Realtek Azalia drivers over the years.
I worry about the physical size of these things getting lost.
I still have my CD's from Windows 95 (I am a pack rat of computers) while all of my flash drives from more than five years are all gone to either my weasel relatives through theft or me accidently forgetting to take them out of my pants when they go to cleaners.
But losing the driver stick benefits the manufacturer, just like bad firmware revisions directly from the manufacturer
Even after bricking several thousand computers, you would think that the manufacturers would figure out that the firmware was bad after several hundred complaints and replace it on their servers with a valid copy but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Should have been standard by now. I can't remember the year that I abandoned optical drives for a a personal system, maybe 10 years ago.
I was surprised that Windows doesn't have drivers for an Intel networking solution on an Asrock motherboard. It is truly inconvenient to get another computer and upload/transfer the driver.
With a USB drive, the driver will install much faster. Value is also added if the USB drive includes other drivers, such as chipset drivers, so that a download is not necessary
I don't have strong feelings, other than either a CD, DVD, or USB stick is much preferable to mini-CDs/mini-DVDs. Those are okay if I'm installing them on a laptop, but are a significant annoyance when trying to install them from a desktop optical tray where there's no connector in the center to keep a mini disk in place. I always have to end up copying those over my intranet from a laptop in those cases, if the vendor's web site isn't good enough to make it easy to find the drivers online.
I wonder if it could be even cheaper just to include enough flash on the board to accommodate drivers, which could then be updated in the UEFI. That would be an interesting value-add, imo, since it could be used to host a live OS for troubleshooting purposes, etc. that couldn't get misplaced.
I wish they would just forgo providing on physical medium drivers at all. Include a link to a static page from which the user can download driver and firmware software for themselves.
Never install the driver from the disc(or flash drive). They're usually outdated and full of useless bloatware. I always recommend to my users that they should go download the drivers directly from the manufacturers website.
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dgingeri - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
This should have happened a long time agoThe Chill Blueberry - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
True, every board has had a usb port right on it since forever. Why would you need to have a bulky unnecessary CD player? The interface is literally bundle with the product, and yet they choose an other one?DanNeely - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Because they can press a DVD for pennies while even a cheap crappy USB drive is going to cost a buck or so. Meanwhile 99% of the time people will be downloading newer drivers from the net anyway.It's probably been at least a decade since I used a driver disk for anything other than a coaster, and I have optical drives available.
MrSpadge - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Or better: just let Win 10 do its thing and download the current driver in the background. I guess most people don't even know which motherboard devices they have drivers for - and that's a good thing.BTW: don't try this with XP. It won't have network drivers to download them and it won't have USB drivers to use that stick.
BTW2: what's the data retention time on that stick? Usual consumer hardware has just 1 year, so pretty bad for archiving. And indeed, the music USB sticks in my car face some elevated temperatures during summer and start to have data corruption after ~1 year.
Bp_968 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
You must be buying some really cheap low end USB drives, or something else weird is going on. I have 4-5 CF cards in my Infiniti that still work fine and have been in there for 6 years or more now.That said, i agree with the gist of your comment. No one should use USB drives for long term storage of irreplaceable data.
Samus - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
True, quality is key. I'm sure these drives from EVGA are pretty low quality. But it will get the job done.As far as memory cards, I have to replace them in my dashcam every year or two. The rewrite cycles burn them out, even the high endurance ones from Sandisk and Samsung don't last more than 10k rewrites.
But other than continuous recording, nothing would thrash a memory card like that.
Also, in the summer, I'm sure the heat beating on the camera while they are constantly recording doesn't help the longevity either. NAND is a rough lifestyle.
Solandri - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
NAND works by trapping a charge inside a cell. That charge slowly leaks out over time. The newer (smaller) NAND actually has more problems, as the smaller fab process means the surface area to volume ratio is larger (there's less charge inside relative to the surface area it can leak out).So I'd expect old NAND drives like CF cards to retain data for a decade or more. The newer USB drives though are suspect, and may lose data after just a few years. (Basically the problem the Samsung EVO 840 ran into.) I suppose it doesn't matter so long as you can download the drivers from the company's website, and the company stays in business so the website doesn't disappear.
Heat shouldn't be a problem. It's not uncommon for SSDs to surpass 100C during operation. A hot car is a refrigerator by comparison. Warping of the plastic case would be a bigger issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hhdWwvh5kI
Alexvrb - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
Ambient temp affects operating temp. For example, dashboard temps on a hot summer day when you first fire it up and the camera starts running, before the A/C has a chance to knock the temp down.Anyway, the "doesn't matter since you can download" argument is really an argument for including no media at all. Why bother? I never install anything from disc. I haven't in years. Why would I install outdated drivers which they try to bundle with other bloatware? Stick a dollar bill in the box for me instead. Or 6 yuan, whatever.
Heck for the average user Windows Update will install WHQL drivers and that's enough. Still probably newer than whatever they tossed in the box.
rocky12345 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Actually you are right most of the time Windows 10 the newer versions will load the drivers after the first boot for the ones it does not have in the ISO installer image. I just loaded 2 machines and within 10 minutes it had all drivers loaded and everything was up and running. The only thing I did was update the graphics drivers and Audio drivers.rocky12345 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
My USB stick in my car has been in there for 2 years throughout summer and winter as well (Canada winter) and so far it has been working fine and it was a very cheap 32GB stick from The Source store (Radio Shack in the USA) I think I paid $9 for it...:)Lord of the Bored - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
Same story, only Texas summers.piiman - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
Hate to break it to you but Win 10 doesn't have all the network drivers either. I've had a asus wireless nic forever and it is never found after I install win 10. I always have to dig up the Driver CD. New HW may also not be included. However Win 10 is pretty good at it even if you change MB it will usually at least boot with the driver from the dvd.Alexvrb - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
Why wouldn't you just stick the driver on a USB stick or external drive?IBM760XL - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link
XP won't have network drivers by default, but USB 2.0 will work out of the box, at least if it's SP2. I've been using an external HDD connected by USB 2.0 to install drivers on fresh XP installs for years.Although I doubt a ton of people will be installing XP on an H370 board. Even I haven't yet installed XP on anything newer than Sandy Bridge.
bug77 - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
This isn't only about the money.You can't simply get online and grab the latest drivers if you haven't installed the chipset and network drivers first. A bit of a catch 22. Also, depending on which USB port you use, your stick may not work before you install some USB drivers.
timecop1818 - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
I'm sorry, but if you're using some garbage hardware with such a random USB chipset that even Windows 10 doesn't have a driver for it, you should probably just quit computing, it's not for you.mapesdhs - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
Ah yes so your opinion of what is valid hw should apply to everyone, in all situations, no matter what.Alexvrb - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
He's not entirely wrong. What modern USB chipsets don't have at least basic out of the box support in Win10? Heck even BEFORE you install Windows, for that matter, for example in the BIOS for flashing. If you don't have at least one USB port that works, you have bigger issues.Anyway, it's not hard to stick wifi drivers on a stick/external drive/phone/punchcards and get a PC online so you can snag drivers. If you don't have functional internet but still need a cutting edge PC, go into town and borrow some bandwidth, download most current drivers ahead of build time.
random_programmer - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
Can't talk of Windows 10 as I've never used it, but when I installed Windows 8.1 on an ASUS Z97 motherboard, it didn't know what to do with the Intel NIC, and needed to be given the drivers before it would do anything involving the ethernet port (thankfully I'd downloaded them to a USB stick firts...).alpha754293 - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link
So here is a question for people then - how do you guys get your OS installed the if you're not using an optical disc?Does EVERYBODY install via a bootable USB drive?
What happens if you don't have USB 3.0 drivers that are rolled in to the installation media?
Or does EVERYBODY else all just use PXE to jumpstart the installation of the OS onto their system? (and what happens if you don't have updated network drivers in your PXE install image?)
close - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
I haven't used a disc for OS media in years. Since the later years of Win XP I've used USB sticks and never looked back. There's no benefit to using a disc. They're more fragile, larger, require an optical drive, they're slower (even than USB 2.0) and noisier in operation.Since these days you can very easily download the ISO from the MS website and put it on a USB stick using the MS tool why would you even bother with discs? All you need is an 8GB USB 2.0 or above and as you can see sometimes they're free :). And you can put the drivers on the same stick.
alpha754293 - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - link
But again, that's only true if you have the boot mini driver integrated into the installation media's bootstrap.That's not necessarily true, especially for USB, network, and video drivers.
I ask this question because I just deployed a SuperServer 6027TR-HTRF and also two HP Z420 workstations where trying to install Windows 7 in AHCI mode completely and utterly failed with a USB stick.
And I did the research online and tried to integrate the USB drivers into the install media and it still failed.
Ultimately, I had to downgrade the SATA ports performance from AHCI back to IDE-compatible mode in order to get the install to work and I also tried installing the AHCI driver after installation and upon reboot, it still failed, so it's staying in IDE mode.
alpha754293 - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - link
It works for Windows 10, but it doesn't work for Windows 7.close - Monday, June 4, 2018 - link
Microsoft's tool to write an ISO to a USB stick is called Windows7 USB 2 DVD:https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.a...
And it works with any OS iso you download from MS (I used it with Win7, 8, 8.1, all versions of 10, and all the Server equivalents of these).
Unless you have a really non standard machine with an exotic USB controller that's not supported with standard USB drivers you're safe. And if you put all the other drivers in a folder on the stick in advance you don't have to worry about not being able to access the network or anything. Simply install all the drivers after OS installation and you're good to go even in Win7.
It's a lot more flexible and faster than a DVD.
Samus - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Just another thing that keeps EVGA legit. Considering even Microcenter sells 8GB flash drives for $4 not even on sale and 3 packs for $9.99, who knows how much EVGA gets these for in bulk...probably a dollar.bill.rookard - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
Why would they buy them? They could task someone to -make- them once. They design electronics for crying out loud. Even if they changed their mind, they could just as easily turn them around and sell them as EVGA branded sticks.hellfish - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
You can still put those circle things in computers?mapesdhs - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
When I want to play a movie I actually own and doesn't need a net link to access it, yes.Alexvrb - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
Why have any media? The only thing you *might* need is wifi drivers to get the system online (depending on your wifi card/chip). What person building their own systems doesn't have access to any media and another device? Heck even if I didn't I could download the driver on my phone, connect to the PC, transfer it over, boom.Once the PC is online, you can easily download the other drivers yourself if you want the newest ones, or else just let Windows install WHQL drivers. A USB stick is a waste. I've probably thrown away hundreds of driver CDs. Go green, bundle no media. :P
xilience - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Would be great to see a spot on the motherboard for storing this, so you don't have to worry about losing it. (Not that losing CDs wasn't also a problem, but... PROGRESS!)edzieba - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Sticking drivers onto an EMMC chip on the board would be a neat idea (could even be updated when network-connected to a fresh re-install will always be on the latest version), but a non-removable storage device seems like a ripe vector for malware too. Sticking a drive on a DOM into one of the USB 2 header ports could be an option, but that is likely more expensive than the encapsulated-PCB style drive shown here.DanNeely - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
The problem is that you'd then have the driver flash showing up as a storage devices on your computer 24/7; and explorer is already too crapped up with useless stuff MS has jammed into the sidebar.RagnarAntonisen - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
One approach would be to put the drivers into the Bios. MS have an admittedly very dubious way to do that already. It's how Lenovo put a rootkit in there.https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_fi...
In fact the vendor wouldn't need to put the actual drivers into the Windows Platform Binary Table, just an exe file that knew how to download them from the server.
The problem with this is that they might decide to put some value added software into the download too. That would suck because even a clean install of Windows wouldn't be clean on such a system - the WPBT exe file would download all the value added stuff that people had paid the motherboard vendor to preinstall.
tl;dr - it could be done, but you'd better hope motherboard vendors don't start doing it. One of the reasons for building a PC rather than buying a prebuilt one is because you want to avoid value added software, aka bloatware.
Azurael - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
Ah, that must be how the CompuTrace/LoJack rootkit works, too. I'd always wondered....Alexvrb - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
It was a good concept at a high level, but as you said it was quickly abused by OEMs, plus said OEMs didn't do a very good job of securing their end of things.The last thing I want is for retail mainboards to get such a feature.
ET - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link
Interesting idea. Would be cool if motherboards included a microSD slot by default and shipped with the drivers on a microSD card that's already inserted. That could be expanded to shipping a full work / rescue environment, Linux based, with a motherboard.fred666 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Don't people get their drivers on the Internet anyways?Of course when the bare OS doesn't have the driver for your network card that sucks, but other than that I don't see any use for the DVD/USB thumb drive.
Death666Angel - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
And with nearly everyone owning connected smartphones, even that isn't such an obstacle as it was 15 - 20 years ago. I remember when I was waiting for gaming magazine CDs and DVDs to deliver fresh graphic card drivers, especially when it was the hacked, more capable version such as Omega for my ATI 9500 @ 9700 Pro. :DMrSpadge - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
If you don't have network drivers you won't be able to connect to your smartphones WIFI either. Or if you want to transfer via USB I think there's a certain company which doesn't allow its phones to do such simple things.Death666Angel - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
I was thinking of the normal USB cable route. :) Apple still doesn't have USB mass storage capabilities in their smartphones?Mitch89 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Omega drivers! Gosh that’s brings me back, I remember using those on my Dell Inspiron 8600 with the Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo.IBM760XL - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link
I remember the Dox drivers for nVIDIA back in the day! Those things were the best! Of course eventually the official ones would catch up, but it'd give you a boost for a long time, back in the day when that could mean a few FPS when trying to play Crysis.Ian Cutress - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Most if the time, network drivers are needed. However Win10 1803 does have most of the Intel gigabit controller network driversMitch89 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Yeah it’s been a while since I’ve needed drivers to get network connectivity.Heck, these days a cheap Realtek based USB WiFi adaptor is a few dollars on eBay, and installs automatically on Windows 10.
Zinabas - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Is noone else worried about a rewritable medium being included with all this now? Disks are write once, no tampering at the factory where its assembled, literally any employee at the packaging area can start rewriting these with any number of harmful software packages and you'd be none the wiser. Since its a motherboard its very unlikely you'll have AV installed before the drivers as well.cosmotic - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
They are write protected. Some emulate a cdrom drive.PeachNCream - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Not write protected. From the article above:"The drive is also re-writeable so it can be used for other purposes as well."
mapesdhs - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
People will often give up freedoms and security for a bit more perceived convenience.A5 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Anyone who really wants to can just add stuff the UEFI image or the GM of the DVD.ThreeDee912 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
AFAIK, typically newer drivers and other kinds of software are code signed so Win10 will give you warnings and make it difficult for you to install if it's unsigned code or other code that has been tampered with. Signed software typically just requires you to allow it with a UAC prompt and shows the author of the software.Zinabas - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link
I'm not talking about bad drivers, I'm talking anything else they want to put on it that runs through the setup wizard when you first plug it in. you almost definitely won't have an antivirus, even if you do it won't be up to date because if you could use the internet the entire point of the driver cd is moot.zmeul - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
fucking ATEAMSWITCHER - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Apple's Mac's can update everything ... including the firmware and OS ... over the internet. Changing the media type isn't really progress, compared to Apple. Will Microsoft ever fix this? Probably not.nismotigerwvu - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Comparing OSX and Windows on this front is completely apples to oranges (pun intended). Apple really only has a handful of possible hardware configurations to worry about and only from vendors they directly work with. On Windows you have a near infinite list of permutations, including companies that Microsoft has no official communication with. That and Windows has extensive legacy support, whereas Apple has been willing to draw lines in the sand.Reflex - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Microsoft branded devices can also do this. All Surface updates, for instance, occur over the internet including firmware, OS and drivers. Many third parties also provide similar methods for their own hardware. Some publish such updates on Windows Update, but its up to the vender.A5 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
The driver disk is only needed when you have to bootstrap basic functionality (like, say, the network driver) to get the OS installed if you DIY.Modern OEM systems keep a recovery partition on the hard drive for this purpose.
After that Windows Update can do everything besides your BIOS.
cmdrdredd - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Asus has had software that can do this for years.mapesdhs - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
Progress btw would be Apple not screwing its customers when they need to get something repaired.austinsguitar - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
11/10 needs to start happening everywhere reallyHStewart - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
I don't believe this is new - but it is rare - I remember some package had USB instead or disk. Most things could be gotten from Internet any way.A5 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
It's only really needed if you're installing clean on hardware that wasn't out when your OS media was made.Once you get it installed, Windows downloads the latest WHQL stuff if it needs to.
Chugworth - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Here's an idea. Good motherboards now should have the ability to download the latest UEFI update directly through the UEFI interface. Why not add the ability in the UEFI interface to download specific drivers to a USB drive? That way they won't have to include any type of driver disk.The bundled drivers are usually outdated by the time you take the product out of the box, and both Windows and Linux are pretty good about loading the needed drivers on their own.
A5 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Yeah, this is probably the ideal solution.UEFI tells you to insert a USB drive, gets the latest signed bundle from the OEM, and puts it on there in the format Windows wants.
Ian Cutress - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
ASRock has this option, although it requires the BIOS image to have the network driver and support DHCP with no proxy in the mix. Bearing in mind the low single digit percentage of people that are comfortable doing anything in the BIOSCaedenV - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Some HP Printers come with built in storage with drivers. You plug the printer into your USB port, it is recognized as a mass storage device, you install the driver, and then it transitions to a printer connection. Whats more; when you upgrade the firmware of the deivce, it also updates these built in drivers... granted, it also locks you out of being able to use 3rd party cartridges... win some loose some?Still, would be sort of neat to get basic network and chipset drivers as a sort of on-board, BIOS managed storage device. Once you had that, you can download the rest of the drivers easily.
esSJae - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Make it bootable and include BIOS recovery utilities too!jrs77 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
I've not used a driver disk for the last decade. The drivers on the CD/DVD are outdated the moment the box gets shipped to the retailers, so I allways download the newest drivers on a second PC and put them on a USB-stick to have the whole driver-package (chipset, ethernet, sound, GPU, DirectX, .Net, etc, etc ) ready for installation.Mitch89 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Ditto, can’t remember the last time I used a driver CD for anything. I’d generally download the latest graphics driver and network driver (if necessary) on another PC, then let windows find everything else.Thorlord - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
I love this, Though I only ever really buy Power Supplies from them so i'll never see em. I have to give them credit for making what is really a small but extremely smart change.rocky12345 - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Yes about time lets hope more companies start doing this soon. What would be even better is if it self updated itself when you plug it in if the system is connected to the internet and gets the latest drivers from the companies driver page for each product.MadAd - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Finally! I've long wanted to see all optical media replaced at the point of sale, for instance why can we still not buy a blockbuster movie on some silicon instead of clinging to a redundant optical format? Albums could be marketed on a stick for laptop or otg users...surely some marketing department can see some value in that? Otherwise IMO Its just cost, and the will to be different stopping them now.I never thought it would come from the tech world but im pleased to see first steps from any direction, thankfully EVGA dared to be different, well done them!!
timecop1818 - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
because pressing 100,000 blurays is orders of magnitude cheaper than flash or mask rom, especially at the capacities of bd disks these days - iirc there's bdxl that goes up to 100gb/disk? good luck making that on flash for the same price.ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
You're kidding right?Nobody is going to press Blu-Rays as there are too few users who have drives for them but they all have USB
I use Blu-Rays because I record my own and all of my computers have a Blu-Ray Burner in them
100GB Blu-Ray disks are pretty much worthless though as there is a huge difference between the reliability and speed of a 6X Blu-Ray and a 4X Blu-Ray
You should only buy 6X or higher
Newer 50GB Blu-Rays are 6X (Verbatim)
Older 50GB Blu-Ray discs and Newer 100GB discs are 4X
If you can afford a few M-Discs, you will find that a 6X M-Disc will record at the same speed as a regular 6X disc but the drive will access and read them noticeably better than regular discs
and never trust your burning software to tell you that the disc was burned correctly
The only way to reliably tell if the disc is good is to copy the contents of the disc back to your hard drive without any pop-up error messages
mapesdhs - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
Just curious on that last sentence, do you mean a disc verify from within something like ImgBurn can't be relied upon?ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
I have never seen a disk verification to be reliableIt always says the disc was burned without errors until you try to read it later
If I get a CRC or data cannot be read error when copying the contents back to hard disk after a burn, I immediately break the disk and do over
Another problem is Windows!
If you find that you get several bad disks in a row, simply "MOVE" the contents of your temporary burn directory to any other directory on your hard drive and burn it again
When you start adding files to a burn directory over a period of several hours or days, Windows has a bad habit of messing up the burn
Simply dragging the contents of the burn directory to any other directory will instantly sort everything out and like magic and the next burn will be good!
Don't ask me why though, I have no idea how Windows can mess it up that badly but it happened several times before I started moving the burn contents to a new directory before every burn and the problem disappeared instantly and permanently
quorm - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Sounds good, but driver's themselves are never multiple gigs. It's just a bunch of software no one really wants or needs that's making it so big.mczak - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Yes, 6.6GB for "motherboard drivers" is of course ridiculous. If they'd cut down the bloatware it should all easily fit on a CD again :-).Just for reference, a windows 10 ISO file is roughly 4GB, and that includes way more drivers than any single board would need...
ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Saturday, May 19, 2018 - link
Yes, My Current Windows-XP Backup with all drivers and basic software fits easily on a Re-Recordable Mini-DVD+RW (8-CM)When copied to the 2nd partition of an SSD, Acronis will restore the full backup in 18 seconds with all the drivers or 9 seconds without the drivers
A Re-Writable DVD is durable enough for backups that require minor changes every 6 months or so
A 50GB Blu-Ray disk holds ALL of my Windows backups on a READ-ONLY disk to prevent malware overwrites
Windows-XP / 7 /8.1 and even Win 10 backups can all fit on a single disk along with the .WIM files to Re-Install Windows to Go if necessary and the original Driver software + other basic Utilites
IBM760XL - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link
I was wondering how it added up to that much too. Are they also including drivers for all potential GPUs/network adapters/printers you might connect? Do they have separate versions for all versions of Windows back to 3.1 on the disc, plus several flavors of BSD? Admittedly my desktop's driver archive is 2.91 GB, but over half of that is due to having saved multiple versions of Radeon and Realtek Azalia drivers over the years.MFinn3333 - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
I worry about the physical size of these things getting lost.I still have my CD's from Windows 95 (I am a pack rat of computers) while all of my flash drives from more than five years are all gone to either my weasel relatives through theft or me accidently forgetting to take them out of my pants when they go to cleaners.
mapesdhs - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
Indeed, I can see future used mbd sales on ebay typically not coming with the original USB driver stick, long since lost.ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
But losing the driver stick benefits the manufacturer, just like bad firmware revisions directly from the manufacturerEven after bricking several thousand computers, you would think that the manufacturers would figure out that the firmware was bad after several hundred complaints and replace it on their servers with a valid copy but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Gotta sell something new!
zodiacfml - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
Should have been standard by now. I can't remember the year that I abandoned optical drives for a a personal system, maybe 10 years ago.I was surprised that Windows doesn't have drivers for an Intel networking solution on an Asrock motherboard. It is truly inconvenient to get another computer and upload/transfer the driver.
With a USB drive, the driver will install much faster. Value is also added if the USB drive includes other drivers, such as chipset drivers, so that a download is not necessary
ruthan - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
Companies trying to save every cent and packages looks cheaper and cheaper, this is one improvement im comparison with many degradation'sbeginner99 - Monday, May 21, 2018 - link
I don't see the point of this when you can get newest driver online from their sites or windows itself.chenedwa - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link
Other companies, such as Foxconn, have already been using USB chiclets since 2014 for drivers to support their barebones nanoPC.IBM760XL - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link
I don't have strong feelings, other than either a CD, DVD, or USB stick is much preferable to mini-CDs/mini-DVDs. Those are okay if I'm installing them on a laptop, but are a significant annoyance when trying to install them from a desktop optical tray where there's no connector in the center to keep a mini disk in place. I always have to end up copying those over my intranet from a laptop in those cases, if the vendor's web site isn't good enough to make it easy to find the drivers online.crashtech - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
I wonder if it could be even cheaper just to include enough flash on the board to accommodate drivers, which could then be updated in the UEFI. That would be an interesting value-add, imo, since it could be used to host a live OS for troubleshooting purposes, etc. that couldn't get misplaced.johnny_boy - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
I wish they would just forgo providing on physical medium drivers at all. Include a link to a static page from which the user can download driver and firmware software for themselves.draknon - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
Never install the driver from the disc(or flash drive). They're usually outdated and full of useless bloatware. I always recommend to my users that they should go download the drivers directly from the manufacturers website.