Every large trade show has a bunch of cool things that aren’t worth doing a full article on but are too interesting to not share. CES is no exception, so here are some odds and ends from SanDisk, Ricoh/Pentax, OCZ, and Moneual that have absolutely nothing in common other than my sarcasm.
First up is SanDisk, and this year at CES the big news was their new OEM SSD line called the X110. Your heart is probably racing by now, OEM storage does that to enthusiasts, and the new X110 looks just like all the other SanDisk SSD, a black box with rounded corners. Not only that, but this one comes in capacities of 64-256GB, all in the same 2.5″ drive case. Talk about exciting!
Sandisk enterprise lineup
The X110 and it’s consumer cousin the Ultra Plus use a Marvell controller, and are rated at 530MBps read, 445MBps write speeds. The two products beside them are the Lightning SAS enterprise SSD and the Lightening PCIe cards. These two are much more interesting than OEM products, the Lightening PCIe line is one to watch, trust us on this, good things are coming.
From there we change gears entirely and move on to Ricoh/Pentax, two great tastes that go great together. Unfortunately, the two great companies are not fully integrated yet, so the Pentax booth at CES had the following Ricoh panoramic camera prototype on display in a glass case.
Ricoh panoramic camera, not quite eight feet tall
Why was this unfortunate? The product’s name, which actually wasn’t displayed at the show, was about all anyone knew about it. Actually, it no one SemiAccurate talked to actually knew that, but they could read back the panoramic camera description quite professionally. It was a Ricoh product, they were Pentax, and had no clue who to ask about it. It may be productized this summer, and probably has some features and a price too, but, err, ask Ricoh. So we did, and all of our zero Ricoh contacts told us many times more info than the zero we got at the show. That said, it could be quite an interesting product category.
OCZ Vector PCIe 4x SSD
Going back to the more conventional PC products, we have the OCZ Vector PCIe 4x SSD. If you take two OCZ vectors, strip them of the case, and put them on a 4x PCIe2 card, you have the above. If you are sick and tired of all the SSDs with a mere 500MBps +/- a little depending speeds, this is the card for you. It will do a claimed 1000MBps when it is released in Q2, the early version we saw was hitting 950+MBps so we think the extra 50 won’t be a problem. It will come in 240, 480, and 960GB capacities and uses two Indilinx Barefoot 3 controllers. Buy lots, you know you have open PCIe 4x slots that you have no use for, now you do.
Moneual home windmill
Tilting on a bit, we come to the burgeoning portable home windmills sector, the perfect Chinese New Year gift for the urban high rise dweller. Moneual, the Korean maker of very stylish PCs, home care products, accessibility products, and AV equipment is now making the MCT-500 windmill. To be more specific, the MCT-500 is a Small Wind Generator, but there is no reason you couldn’t pull your manual home grain mill out of the kitchen and lash them together. If you need about 500W of power on a windy day, pick up an MCT-500, if you can find one, they aren’t on the Moneual site yet.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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