SanDisk: 32GB Solid State Drive
SanDisk is first to market with Solid State Disks in 2.5″ cases. This is huge, people!
It may seem like very little storage for a hard drive in the news – but there is one very large advantage: it’s all flash storage! No moving platters, clacking drive heads, or spinning bearings… just the silence and security of flash ram.
Companies like IBM and Apple have had to include special hardware to detect the tilt and acceleration of their laptops so that the computer could stop the hard drive before it hit something hard and caused the drive heads to scrape the platters.
iPods and laptops with hard drives are taken with pilots above altitudes of 15k feet – only to find out their hard drives have failed for lack of air density. Another weakness in the hard drive design, it requires a certain amount of air to cause the drive heads to hover over the spinning platters. When you get in thinner altitudes, the drive heads crash into the platters ruining the drive beyond repair.
Oh, and did I mention power?
Your laptop probably pretty power hungry – my ThinkPad R52 in a “power saving” mode chews on about 21 watts of power. With a little tweaking and disabling wireless, and back lite I can get it to about 15 watts. Well, this SSD will shave off another watt of power usage – 7% longer charger.
SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 achieves a sustained read rate of 62-megabyte (MB)*/sec and a random read rate of 7000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer – more than 100 times faster than any hard disk drive.
These performance figures boost system performance. For instance, SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 can boot Microsoft Windows® Vista™ Enterprise on a laptop in as little as 35 seconds. SanDisk SSD achieves an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds.
But who needs more time, when you have a drive that is 100 times faster? The speed increases alone make it worthy of putting into server production for caching database and web content.
The result of this new use of old technology is only going to get faster, smaller, and cheaper. You may not see a new Powerbook or ThinkPad rolling off the production lines with 32GB SS drives, but it won’t be very long for SanDisk or a competitor to double or quadruple this storage space in the next year or two.
I’m In UR – The Whole Lot
Some collections are just worth their weight in LOL’s and LMFAO’s…
If you’ve seen them – they’re worthy of making sure you’ve seen them all. If you haven’t seen any… well, you’re in for a few good laughs…
Cash Parking, part two
An update to an experiment I was doing this month with GoDaddy’s CashParking service. (See the original post here.)
So far, I’ve had 26 visits, and one click on a domain – and it earned me a whopping 58 cents.
In comparison I’ve had a couple of clicks on Google’s ads, and they’ve earned me about $1.26 in the same period. But I have to continue writing content that people want to read… I guess I can’t just sit back on a half dozen parked domains and expect it to pay my mortgage.
I’d need a few million domains for that to actually be profitable.
And just for good measure…
Viral Marketing… we all get sick.
In this world of viral marketing, you’re going to see a lot of stuff get blown way out of proportion in the blogosphere. You see we’ve become accustomed to gathering the daily events and news footage for our ADHD lives from sources written by blokes like me and the next website you’ll be visiting shortly after you read this.
Okay, case in point. Lenovo needed to drum up some nifty good press when it took over IBM’s ThinkPad line of laptops. The general public was afraid of what the Chinese company was going to do with their beloved Big Iron laptops.
So they came out with these really slick, computer generated commercials touting a fictitious test lab and new technology. It really was great commercial fodder, it didn’t annoy the viewer or tout the latest model or price slashing.
These commercials ran for a limited time in early 2006. Shortly after they were picked up, recorded, and sent to YouTube for everyone to link to and gawk at…
If you’re new to YouTube, you’ll see many of the same videos – posted by different people hoping to get good ratings and feedback by posting something popular. And it just so happens that these Lenovo marketing videos were posted again – just for fun.
But wait, there’s more!
Well, that would have all there is to this story… but that would have been a boring post, so there’s more.
Today, what must have been a slow news day for gadget blog TecheBlog, posted a story about how they got some secret footage and they’re “breaking the story” about this new technology from Lenovo’s research lab…
Someone acquired these tapes from an “acquaintance” — showing test footage from Lenovo’s research facility. They include a holographic, armored, and hovering laptop. Fun to watch, but purely concepts, nice job Lenovo.
And more:
“When my acquaintance watched the tapes back, he found some footage that he just had to get it out into the public domain. I’ve watched the material myself and I’ve got to agree with him – it’s pretty amazing stuff.”
And that’s not all… if you act now – you’ll get your blog posted on Digg!
http://www.digg.com/hardware/Laptops_of_the_Future
Someone went and submitted this story to Digg.com, a “news” site (notice the quotes, that’s very important) that gives users the power to promote or demote stories that interest them by ‘digging’ the story. It’s a great concept and a site I visit often, but wrought with abuses and falsely promoted stories by groups of people. A recent story in Wired even describes how you can pay to promote your story on Digg.
With literally tens of thousands of users hitting your site (and your ads) – it’s a good thing to have a story hit Digg’s front page.
But this is just a prime example how you can get millions of dollars of free advertising by using a few select ads in that capture the attention of some bloggers. It’s viral, and it’s on the internet, and it’s going to spread for a very long time. Use common sense and wash your hands often.
Another satisfied TiVo customer…
Kevin, like many other TiVO customers isn’t really happy with the device…
Good job Kevin. Maybe someone at TiVo is watching.
