Hasta La Gadget!

Man, Intel can’t win for losin’. After it was forced to issue a firmware update to remedy an off-the-wall slowdown issue that affected a few of its original X25-M SSDs, the outfit is already having to push out a patch to solve a minor quirk with its newfangled 34nm X25-M G2 drives. According to Puget System‘s William George, his company — along with NewEgg and a number of other respected vendors — was forced to yank the new drive from its website shortly after it became available. Turns out, there is a defect in the initial shipment that could cause data corruption if “a password is set on the drive in the system BIOS, and then changed or disabled later.”

We’re told that a firmware fix should be out within a fortnight, and while most companies are allowing folks to hold off and wait for factory-patched drives, those who don’t foresee themselves placing such a password on their SSD can go ahead and enjoy the spoils of 34nm flash goodness while waiting for Intel’s engineers to do their thang. Oh, and if you’re thinking about buying in now, you should probably know that Intel has halted shipments until the fix is complete. Ready to deal with a shortage, are you?

[Image courtesy of HotHardware, thanks Joseph]

Filed under: Storage

BIOS password snag subdues Intel’s 34nm X25-M G2 launch party originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Jul 2009 02:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was only two days ago that they finally became official, but already we’ve got a couple of reviews springing up to tell us all about the second generation X25-M SSDs from Intel. PC Perspective kick things off with a full examination of the new drive, finding plenty of good (improved random reads and writes), some bad (minor fragmentation issues under extreme use scenarios) and pretty much no ugly. Not to be outdone, Anandtech have dissected the drive and compared its innards with the older generation hardware, while also running a few benchmarks for good measure. The conclusion in both camps is that while Intel has improved the hardware side of things, it is the drastically reduced price that makes the X25-M G2 the best choice in the consumer SSD space. Navigate past the break for a pricing chart, but remember that retail cost will be a bit steeper, should you be able to snag one in the wild.

Read – HotHardware review
Read – PC Perspective review
Read – Anandtech preview

Continue reading Intel’s 34nm X25-M runs like a thoroughbred SSD, costs less

Filed under: Storage

Intel’s 34nm X25-M runs like a thoroughbred SSD, costs less originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been a long, long while since we’ve seen a new Crucial-branded SSD, but we’d argue that Lexar Media couldn’t have picked a better time to end the hiatus. The M225 solid state drive family is the fastest, most capacious Crucial SSD line to date, and while they still lag behind OCZ’s new Vertex Turbo SSD drives, they don’t lag by much. The 2.5-inch SATA units can hit read speeds of up to 250MBps and write speeds of up to 200MBps, and the whole lot features MLC NAND flash memory and a SATA 2.0 (3Gbps) interface. Available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB models, the trio is also fully compatible with the Crucial SK01 external drive storage kit, and unlike so many competitors, Lexar decided to go rouge and actually announce prices for the now-available units: $169.99, $329.99 and $599.99 in order of mention. Not too shabby, wouldn’t you agree?

Filed under: Laptops

Lexar Media issues 64GB, 128GB and 256GB Crucial M225 SSDs originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn’t want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back — so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We’ll be handing out a new gadget every day to lucky readers until we run out of stuff or companies stop sending things. Today we’ve got an OCZ Technology Summit Series SATA II 2.5-inch 60GB SSD on offer, which ought to make your aging laptop quite happy. Read the rules below (no skimming — we’re omniscient and can tell when you’ve skimmed) and get commenting! Hooray for free stuff!

Huge thanks to OCZ Technology for providing the gear!

The rules:

• Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but if you want to share your proposal for “fixing” the world economy, that’d be sweet too.
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you’ll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) OCZ Technology Summit Series SATA II 2.5-inch 60GB SSD. Approximate retail value is $239.
• If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of the end of the contest. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen.
• Entries can be submitted until Tuesday, July 17th, at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

Filed under: Storage

Engadget’s recession antidote: win an OCZ Summit Series 60GB SSD! originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just last summer, Toshiba’s Portege R500 was the first laptop with a 128GB SSD. A year later, Toshiba’s Portege R600 is the world’s first 512GB SSD lappie. So for this one moment, Toshiba is on the top of the world.

Design
Note: The R600 has been out for several months, we just tested their updated system with the mega SSD. So if you’ve read about the build before, you can skip down to our section on performance.

For $3,500 (as tested with 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U9400, 3GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Intel 4500MHD graphics, DVD burner, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi n), the Portege may be a bit of a disappointment right out of the box. Yes, it’s ridiculously light, starting at 2.46lbs, but that weight comes at a cost of feel. It’s plastic, and no amount of metal paint can get around that. But luckily the plastic is fairly smudge-proof and part of a “shock absorbing design” complete with “spill resistant” keyboard. In other words, the system may be more durable than a Macbook, especially with so few moving parts.

The 12.1-inch screen is technically WXGA (widescreen) resolution, though something about the system’s shape makes it look more vertical, like a 4:3 screen of yore. This is a minor point, of course, and its non-glossy screen gets just bright enough to use indoors by a window. In full-out sunlight, you can one-button switch the system into “transreflective” mode, essentially using the sun to brighten the screen. High brightness (in standard mode) is still the brightest setting, even under direct sunlight, but the transreflective setting probably uses a lot less power.
Extras, from the effective fingerprint scanner to the eSATA and SD ports, do a lot to sweeten the deal on the small, utilitarian system. And in this era, it’s straight up shocking to see an optical bay pop out of a system that’s just .77 inches thick.

Performance
The R600 runs Vista very fluidly, especially given its stature. Firefox, Windows Media Player, HD content streamed from the web—none of it will leave you waiting. But given the system’s Intel 4500MHD GPU, don’t get any fantasies of gaming.

Many will expect the computer to boot nearly instantly given the SSD—I’ve heard this expectation a number of times—but the still takes about a minute to fully load. The bottleneck here is simply not the hard drive.
How does the R600 compare to other light systems like the Macbook Air or Lenovo X301? Just as you’d expect from the specs on paper, it’s slower than the Macbook Air. But even with the same processor, it outperforms the X301.

Then you have to check out the speeds on the SSD.
Fast! This isn’t some bargain basement drive that Toshiba shoved in a laptop for bragging rights. I mean, a 512GB SSD is clearly for bragging rights, but it’s Toshiba’s biggest and fastest drive made in-house—way nicer than we see competition from Lenovo and Apple (which we believe to both use earlier gen, Samsung drives).

But what does this speed chart mean in real life? Copying a 700MB file on my Macbook Pro (with a 320GB, 7200 RPM hard drive) took 35 seconds. On the R600, that same copy may have legitimately cracked the 8 second barrier. I’d like to say that I never took the speed for granted, but I totally started taking the speed for granted. Superman doesn’t bow down and thank the sun every time he avoids traffic by flying over Metropolis, so why should I be any different?
Toshiba’s 6-cell battery is rated internally at 7 hours, 32 minutes. I found that it offers 3 hours and 35 minutes of MPEG4 playback (screen maxed bright, Wi-Fi on, Bluetooth off, performance settings normal). Our test is rigorous, and it’s pretty common for laptops to only get about 50% of their rated battery life in our real world use simulation. Of course, the computer could probably eek out another 30 minutes to an hour with less taxing processes and a dimmer screen.

I Might Buy One…In 2011
The key to remember, of course, is that the 128GB R500 ran $3,000 just a year ago. Now, their 512GB R600 is $3,500. Even with the price bump on their top tier system, Toshiba has the right idea here: Push the envelope and force the market to adapt. Keep topping the sundae with cherries and someone will be hungry enough to buy it (meanwhile those of us who aren’t will have plenty of dropped cherries to munch on).
Still, I don’t know that I’d recommend this fully stuffed R600 with full gusto. It’s simply not as beautiful as premium, small-form laptops like the Dell Adamo or Apple’s Macbook Air (side by side above), and the prices of flash storage will certainly come down (and quickly at that). But I’m glad Toshiba made the thing because, frankly, somebody needed to load a laptop with a legitimately beastly SSD first.


The huge SSD Is fast


Under 3lbs, less than an inch thick


Substantial ports and extras


For $3,500, it feels a bit like a Pontiac

[Additional benchmarks from AppleInsider and ThinkPad Forums]