Hasta La Gadget!

You have more of your memories stored online than all of your ancestors ever left behind. The future of memory is already here.

When I take picture of a really delicious chocolate bread pudding that I’m about to eat, I might upload it to share with tens, or thousands, of people. That photo, the memory of that pudding, exists in my brain, on my phone, on my computer (and its backup), on servers owned by Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Tumblr and Apple. And inside of the minds of everybody cursing me for showing them that, until they forget. We don’t just have more (and more vivid) digital scraps of memory, they’re scattered all over the world like nuclear fallout, where they’re able to experienced by more people than ever. I didn’t go to your party, but I saw 156 pictures of it on Facebook.

The first hard disk drive for personal computers was the ST-506, by Seagate. A 5.25-inch disk, it held 5 megabytes of data and cost $1500 in 1980. Today, a 2-terabyte 3.5-inch Seagate Barracuda hard drive costs $180. That’s roughly 400,000x the storage for 1/8th the price. Although the brain and drives store data totally differently, some experts say the human brain holds between 10 and 100 terabytes. Think about it: We’re now using the same unit of measurement to talk about how much data a hard drive can store that we use for our brains.

The quantity and the quality of data, our digital memories, is exploding: A RAW photo from a Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR consumes roughly 20 megabytes, or 4x the data that the original Seagate drive could hold. It’s nearly 7x the size of the 2.7-megapixel photos taken by Nikon’s D1—introduced in 1999, it was the first digital camera that really started replacing film cameras at newspapers. Cellphones shoot photos 4x that large, and record high definition video now. Wilson has 40,000 photos, divided evenly between his cats and his child, in his iPhoto library. Giz’s Adam Frucci has 120 gigabytes of music, half of which you’ve never heard of, on his computer. And the memories we record today, using millions of pixels, billions of bits, will seem just as grainy as the black-and-white photos our grandparents took when they were my age, compared to what’s next.

My leaky brain will probably forget all about seeing your girlfriend spewing all over your sofa, watching a stray roman candle fireball shoot past my friend’s head after ricocheting off a log, and my yummy chocolate bread pudding, until I see them again, years later, the bits perfectly intact. Well, if they survive, anyway, and my computer’s still able to decode the format they’re stored in, rendering them into pictures and videos. A dead format, a defunct service, takes any memories it encodes with it. And if it’s still around, it’ll just be one drop in a pool of a million. Oh, and what happens to all of that when I die and my brain becomes worm poop?

We live in a world where a memory, encoded in bits, flowing in a million directions, can live forever. Maybe that means we’ll live forever. That’s what we want to consider this week. Also, in a sea of 1,000,000 other photos, how am I going to find my chocolate bread pudding again?

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

Turning aged hard drives into clocks has been a common occurrence for years now, but there’s still something magical about this rendition. Designed and crafted by Svofski, the Strobeshnik relies on the stroboscopic effect to create the illusion of a persistent numeric display. The HDD platter itself has ten digits, colon and dash marks cut all the way through it, and by carefully timing the light strobes, the illusion is perfected. Check out a video of the startup just below the break — and be patient, the payoff is spectacularly sweet.

Continue reading Strobeshnik: probably the most awesome hard drive clock of all time

Strobeshnik: probably the most awesome hard drive clock of all time originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seriously, if you’re shopping for an SSD and don’t know the name SandForce yet, you’re not doing it right. The producer of what looks to be the consensus fastest controller on the market is spreading its wings today with a new drive announced by Corsair that offers its SF-1200 chip and capacities of either 100GB or 200GB. The Force follows swiftly in the wake of the Nova and Reactor series and represents Corsair’s new flagship device in this space. It’ll offer the generous consumer a sweet 280MBps read and 260MBps write speeds (yes, those are megabytes we’re talking about), “class-leading random read/write performance,” and the requisite Trim support to ensure it maintains that performance in the long run. A specific price is not yet known, but these are expected out within the next couple of weeks.

Corsair Force gives us another SandForce-controlled SSD speed demon originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember when Western Digital picked up SiliconSystems for a song during the height of last decade’s Great Recession? Here we are a year later looking at the first fruit of that relationship, as WD has just introduced its first consumer-oriented solid state drive in the SiliconEdge Blue and its enterprise-ready SiliconDrive N1x. Both 2.5-inch families feature a native SATA 3.0Gbps interface along with read speeds as high as 240 – 250MB/sec and write rates peaking at around 140 – 150MB/sec, and the former has already hit the test bench on a number of occasions. For those considering the upgrade, you should probably dive into those links below — most everyone came away feeling that the SiliconEdge Blue was a wee bit underwhelming for the price, with Hot Hardware noting that the “Micron C300 and Intel X25-M were measurably faster overall,” and the lofty MSRP just left ’em looking for more. Here’s hoping for a price drop and / or a SiliconEdge Black, eh?

WD’s first SiliconEdge Blue SSD launches, gets reviewed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Western Digital’s My Passport Studio line has been spinning for years now, but today the outfit is pushing out a revamped version with a little something special. Boasting a FireWire 800 interface, a highly pocketable design and 256-bit hardware-based encryption, this here drive offers an “e-label smart display” on the front that actually remains on even when the drive is off and unplugged. Owners can tweak the text on the display as often as they like via WD‘s SmartWare software, and by utilizing e-paper technology, you’ll always be able to see what’s inside at a glance. Just so you’re aware, the company’s shipping this thing in 320GB, 500GB and 640GB flavors, but all three come pre-formatted for Mac use — thankfully your Windows 7 rig won’t have any issues wiping that slate clean and starting over once you hand over your $149.99 to $199.99.

WD’s My Passport Studio wears contents on its sleeve with always-on ‘e-label’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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