Are Hardware Manufacturers Trying to Lock Down Consumer Hardware?
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.
