SOLID STATE DRIVES or SSDs are one of the hottest topics and add-ons that you can get for your PC now, although there's still a lot of confusion going on with regards to what to get, as there are vast differences between the various models and the cost per GB is fairly high.
CORSAIR HAS SOME new toys at CeBIT along the usual lines of flash, memory and power supplies. Nothing was revolutionary, but all were updated in some useful ways.
IF YOU WANTED to see AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours boards or 4 GPU compute platforms at CeBIT, SuperMicro was the place to be. That is only the short list though, there were a lot of other interesting bits all over its corner at Hannover.
IS THIS THE final blow for the good old hard drive? Western Digital has as of today launched two SSD models, the SiliconEdge Blue which is a consumer model and the SiliconDrive N1x which targets data centers and various vertical markets.
POKING AROUND CEBIT has it's benefits, especially if you know what to look for. At the SuperTalent booth, it looks like we found a prototype SATA2 CF/CFast card.
TAPE DRIVES HAVE sort of faded into the dark over the past few years as a backup medium, although many enterprise backup solutions still rely on them on a daily basis. The storage capacities of the various backup tape technologies haven’t really kept up with the development in the hard drive storage market and as such the largest backup tapes only hold about half as much data as today’s largest hard drives.
IN WIN HAD three really cool things on display at CES, some old, some new, but most had not gotten nearly the attention they deserved. The mix covered things from a USB extension cord and HDD protector to cases.
YOU MAY KNOW about Eye-Fi, the company that makes SD cards with an 802.11 radio in them. It has a new generation of parts called the X2 line about to ship.
USB3 IS JUST starting to come into its own, with 17 new devices including some nice motherboards and external HDs to show off the power. As devices get smaller, it is time to introduce the new micro-USB3 connector and cables.
USB 3.0 IS SLOWLY gaining ground and we’re seeing more and more devices being announced. VIA has just announced what it claims to be the first USB 3.0 hub controller and we have no reason to doubt it. Whether it’s needed is another matter altogether, but as always with new technology, there’s the chicken and egg effect and if no one brings out the chips for the bits that people are going to want, then no one’s going to buy into the technology.
RAID IS ONE of those things that you either know what it is, or you don’t care what it is. However, it does offer benefits that make it worth looking into if you’re looking at either getting some extra performance out of your hard drives or want peace of mind that you’ll never lose your data.
Good news for consumers, not so good news for IC makers
NEC MIGHT STILL be the only company making USB 3.0 host controllers for PC motherboards, but there are seemingly oodles of manufacturers of USB 3.0 chips that go into devices that hook up to your PC. A full on price war has already started between these companies and considering that the starting price for these chips was somewhere between $5 to $6 and we’re already down to half of that, we should start seeing some very affordable USB 3.0 devices fairly soon.
WE'VE COME ACROSS an interesting bit of information that we’re fairly certain that no SSD maker would want you to know about. With the current push of SSD drives into every sector of the computer market, no-one seems to have stopped to take a closer look at the drives themselves, but instead everyone’s raving about the performance.
WITH SEVERAL REALLY useful new standards on the horizon, wouldn't it be nice if there was a board or two that did both, USB3.0 and SATA3, and did them well? If you have been waiting for such a beast, the '333 Series' Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 and X58 Extreme 2 are the boards for you.
SUPERTALENT IS THE FIRST out of the gate with a USB 3.0 RAID memory stick it calls RAIDDrive. This thing is said to hit 320MBps when it's plugged into a USB 3.0 port.
WESTERN DIGITAL HAS finally thrown its hat into the SAS ring with the release of the S25 line. Most observers were not expecting this, thinking WD would go from SATA directly to SSDs.
SOLID STATE DRIVES or SSDs are one of the hottest topics and add-ons that you can get for your PC now, although there's still a lot of confusion going on with regards to what to get, as there are vast differences between the various models and the cost per GB is fairly high.
CORSAIR HAS SOME new toys at CeBIT along the usual lines of flash, memory and power supplies. Nothing was revolutionary, but all were updated in some useful ways.
IF YOU WANTED to see AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours boards or 4 GPU compute platforms at CeBIT, SuperMicro was the place to be. That is only the short list though, there were a lot of other interesting bits all over its corner at Hannover.
IS THIS THE final blow for the good old hard drive? Western Digital has as of today launched two SSD models, the SiliconEdge Blue which is a consumer model and the SiliconDrive N1x which targets data centers and various vertical markets.
POKING AROUND CEBIT has it's benefits, especially if you know what to look for. At the SuperTalent booth, it looks like we found a prototype SATA2 CF/CFast card.
TAPE DRIVES HAVE sort of faded into the dark over the past few years as a backup medium, although many enterprise backup solutions still rely on them on a daily basis. The storage capacities of the various backup tape technologies haven’t really kept up with the development in the hard drive storage market and as such the largest backup tapes only hold about half as much data as today’s largest hard drives.
IN WIN HAD three really cool things on display at CES, some old, some new, but most had not gotten nearly the attention they deserved. The mix covered things from a USB extension cord and HDD protector to cases.
YOU MAY KNOW about Eye-Fi, the company that makes SD cards with an 802.11 radio in them. It has a new generation of parts called the X2 line about to ship.
USB3 IS JUST starting to come into its own, with 17 new devices including some nice motherboards and external HDs to show off the power. As devices get smaller, it is time to introduce the new micro-USB3 connector and cables.
WE'VE COME ACROSS an interesting bit of information that we’re fairly certain that no SSD maker would want you to know about. With the current push of SSD drives into every sector of the computer market, no-one seems to have stopped to take a closer look at the drives themselves, but instead everyone’s raving about the performance.
WITH SEVERAL REALLY useful new standards on the horizon, wouldn't it be nice if there was a board or two that did both, USB3.0 and SATA3, and did them well? If you have been waiting for such a beast, the '333 Series' Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 and X58 Extreme 2 are the boards for you.