Hasta La Gadget!

You know those quirky, not-at-all convenient issues that can cause certain solid state drives to lag with extensive use? Yeah — not cool. Thankfully, the engineers at OCZ Technology and Indilinx are fed up, and rather than sitting around doing nothing, they’ve both collaborated on a breakthrough firmware that can actually clean and restore one’s “dirtied” SSD while the drive sits idle. In short, the firmware instructs the SSD to perform a “garbage collection” process in order to mitigate the unwanted block re-writing quandary, where the drive actively seeks and removes garbage that hinders read / write performance when handling small chunks of data. The crew over at HotHardware managed to run a few speed tests with said firmware firmly implemented, and the results are downright shocking: after just five minutes of idle time, the SSD was restored to near new, with an hour of downtime being enough to “totally restore” performance. Don’t believe us? Give that read link a tap, bub.

Filed under: Storage

Indilinx firmware cleans dirty SSDs, restores performance while idle originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It started out as just disheartening, but now it’s downright frustrating. With rare exception, each and every SSD release we hear about these days scuttles skillfully around the issue of price. Take Toshiba, for example, who has just confessed to shipping its 43nm MLC NAND-based solid state drives to five undisclosed OEMs. Not only do we have no clue as to which companies will be integrating these into their machines, but we’ve no idea what these mystery firms are paying. What we do know is this: Tosh’s new range of 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs are leaving the docks now in capacities of 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB — good luck figuring out where they’ll land.

[Via HotHardware]

Filed under: Storage

Toshiba ships 43nm MLC NAND-based SSDs to OEMs for unknown amounts originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 07:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toshiba announced Tuesday that it will offer a 64 GB SDXC memory card that it claims can beat its rivals in terms of speed of data transfer for reading and writing to the card.

The new cards can offer a maximum write speed of 35 MB per second and read speed of 60 MB per second.

The combination of large storage capacities and increased data transfer rates should help meet the needs of consumer electronics devices such as digital cameras and camcorders that require high bandwidth data communication, said Toshiba.

For example, digital SLR cameras will be able to shoot longer continuous bursts in the highest quality RAW format, with the new cards, said the company and it will also be possible to download a 2.4 GB video in 70 seconds.

At the Consumer Electronics Show this year, the SD association announced the SDXC or the Secure Digital Extended Capacity format. The new standard applies to cards with capacities more than 32 GB and up to 2 TB, compared to the SDHC standard, which applies to cards with capacities greater than 2 GB and up to 32 GB. The maximum data transfer rate for SDHC cards is 104 MB/s, with plans to increase it to 300 MB/s.

No word yet on pricing for these cards. Samples of the card will be able in November and it is likely to reach consumers early next year.

Specifications of the 64 GB SDXC card [Toshiba]

Oh sure, Seagate did it first, but since when have we been ones to kvetch about one-upmanship? Over in South Korea, Samsung has debuted an all new high-density hard drive family for use in “high-end computing environments,” or in more comestible terms, your next desktop / workstation. The Spinpoint F3 hums along at 7,200RPM, uses a 3Gbps SATA interface, packs 16/32MB of buffer memory and will be made available in sizes as large as 1TB by utilizing a pair of 500GB-per-platter disks. The boost in areal density provides up to 30 percent higher performance when compared to a three platter 1TB drive in the same 3.5-inch form factor, and the reduction in mechanical parts also makes it less likely to fail prematurely. Sammy isn’t being too forthright when it comes to MSRPs, but those looking to snag one regardless can find the 500GB model on shelves now and the 1TB edition later next month.

Filed under: Storage

Samsung’s 1TB Spinpoint F3 hard drive serves 500GB per platter originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jul 2009 06:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Boardy is a USB stick made from dead trees. Shrinking tech means that your only real physical limit to squeezing a USB drive into anything is the plug itself, and this time the Boardy folks squeezed the electronics into a sheet of paper.

The intended use is clear: schwag. That huge, foldable surface has advertising written all over it, or at least it will at the next trade show or convention you visit, so its likely that you’ll never have to buy one of your own. The paper, once the sponsor’s message is read (or ignored), is folded into a more compact and pluggable form, and midway through this transformation it looks, briefly, like a paper scorpion (above right).

We dig it, and in fact, what’s not to like? You get a free pen-drive, an origami toy and, after you tear the stick from the ad, a stack of paper perfect for propping up a wobbly bar table. Also: scorpions!

Product page [Boardy Products. Thanks, Barry!]