Nice fast SSD - but at a steep price

Intel has launched their new 80GB SSD.

The Intel X18-M and X25-M (so named for their 1.8" and 2.5" hard drive form factor) uses multi-level NAND flash chips to provide 80GB capacity for laptops and desktops without using moving parts. Apparently these SSD drives can read up to 250MB/sec and write at 70MB/sec - both figures are notably higher than standard hard drives, where the sustained read/write rate is usually around 60GB/sec. Even more importantly, as the SSD's have an almost negligable seek time (significantly less than one ms) they can perform far more operations per second than conventional hard drives.

Price? $595... OUCH.

Warp speed, number one

Bit tech reports that Western Digital may be working on a 20,000 rpm Raptor drive to compete against flash drives.

SSD drives continue to fall in price, and they have many benefits over hard drives:

• all solid state
• no rotating media (duh)
• lower power
• practically instant "seeks"

There is also a significant disadvantage - individual areas wearing out - however flash memories are starting to reach very high "write cycle" counts and it is only a matter of time before flash wear becomes a non-issue. Currently flash devices are good for somewhere between 100,000 to 1,000,000 writes to any location, but it is likely that they will go to 10M or more cycles in the future.

How can WD reduce "seek" time?

Simple. Faster head movement - raptors already have a 4.5ms vs. 8ms average head movement compared to 7200rpm drives, and also speeding up the rotation of the platters to lower the rotational latency.

The problem is, the faster the disk spins, the more it wants to come apart, and the more noise it makes.

It will be interesting if WD can be compatible with SSD's

Hard drives with built-in heatsinks? Bring it on

The website Bit-Tech, citing unnamed sources in the hard drive industry, is reporting that Western Digital  (the world's second largest hard drive manufacturer) is hard at work developing a high-capacity, 20,000 RPM hard drive. For comparison's sake, currently the standard new SATA2 hard drive runs at 7,200 RPM, while faster, higher-end drives were only recently introduced which operate at the 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM level.

To cut back on noise, and for cooling, the 20,000 RPM will have a the equivalent of a heatsink, built into its custom 3.5' drive housing. Although 20,000 rotations-per-minute is extreme, this drive supposedly is nearly silent -- thanks in part to this new, more complex housing.

Although this only speculation at this point, a 32MB cache sounds reasonable for this upcoming Raptor HD.

More storage options...

Adaptec is bringing out the new "Series 2" line of RAID controllers. These controllers can handle RAID 0, 1 and 10 in hardware for both SAS and SATA disk arrays, and can also handle tape drives on SAS expanders.

The cards have an 800MHz dual core Raid-On-a-Chip (ROC) controller that are scaled down versions of the controllers on the Series 5 family. The controller will have 128MB of DDR2 for a disk cache and will support up to 128 SATA/SAS io devices with up to 3GB/s at each drive port. The controller supports Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 Vista, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Suse Linux Enterprise Server, SCO OpenServer, UnixWare, Sun Solaris 10 x86, FreeBSD and VMware ESX Server.

The RAID 2405 is available with, one with four internal ports, and one SFF-8087 internal connector for $225, a version that  adds a fanout cable for $250, and a version with an SFF-8088 external connector for $250.

Probably not what the USB-Implementers Forums had in mind for USB

Anybody who uses a computer probably has come across a situation where USB has been really terrific. Having a thumb-drive handy to transfer files is incredibly convenient. Or plugging a printer in and having it work immediately -- many thanks USB!

But the limits of USB-usefulness extends even beyond these daily mundane tasks.

How about, for example, keeping a beverage cold? Well have no fear because USB can again save the day with the USB Mini Fridge. That's right -- just plug it into your computer, and you add drink-cooling functionality to your workstation.

And what happens after you drink that drink? What happens then? Well you might be hungry, that's what. But don't worry -- USB can help you out again with the George Foreman USB iGrill. Perfect for making sandwiches!

But USB is even more useful, believe it or not.

So, say you cooked a Reuben sandwich in your USB iGrill. What are you going to do now? You are satiated by beverage and sandwich, but a funny smell of meat lingers in the air, disrupting your co-workers.

Can any USB devices help you out in this situation?

Yes, some strange ones can! Just possibly pick up a USB 'Scent Drive' from AROMA USB. These small and stylish fragrance dispensers will "make your laptop smell fresh as a flower." For smell on the go, just plug in these sticks'o'smell, and prepare yourself for some olfactory ecstasy.

The wonders of USB are limitless!

(Disclaimer: This story was actually written by Kevin.  I'm posting it on his behalf because he can't post the news himself today.)

Several companies are under investigation because the adhesive used to bond wires in harddrives is patented by someone else.

Computers are getting smaller, therefore, the components used to manufacturer computer hardware shrinks. Case in point; the read/write heads of harddrives. These heads are now so small that the tiny wires that carry the data cannot be soldered into place. Therefore, a type of electrically conductive adhesive is used. Who would have thought that the holders of that patented glue would have petitioned the ITC (International Trade Commission) to investigate, and possible ban these patent infringing drives from ever entering the United States.

The whole issue surround the patent for 'Dissipative Ceramic Bonding Tips' which is held by California residents Steven and Mary Reiber. The method is simply a way to attach ultra-fine wires using pressure rather than solder and heat. The Reibers' are claiming that the likes of Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard and Dell are all guilty of patent infringement. Certainly, those would manufacturer harddrive using this patented bonding method are, and apparently those who would sell PC's that use these harddrives are guilty as well. Using this method of manufacture violates the U.S. Tariff Act of 1930, specifically that of section 337 which states that it is illegal to import a good into the United States that infringes upon the patent, trademark, copyright and or intellectual property of the U.S.       

The same had happened with Qualcomm last June when the ITC slapped a ban on the import of their EVDO chips, circuit board modules, and handsets that infringed upon patents held by the competing company Broadcom. That incident sparked an uprising amongst mobile carrier companies - AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint - who used Qualcomm parts in their phones. Eventually, the US Court of Appeals sided with Qualcomm and lifted the ban after many trade groups stated that such a ban would stifle competition and hurt millions of consumers.

And though this could have potential serious repercussions, the ITC is still reviewing the matter and will not decide upon a definate course of action for at least another month. 

It's quite likely though that nothing will come of this. Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard and Dell are tech industry giants, and a ban of their products for some quibbling over what is essentially a pressure sensitive glue, a ban on harddrives could bring an entire nation (citizens, government, industry, business, military, etc.) to its knees.

Where else are we going to store our MP3's?

Microsoft wrings out some plans for web based computing in Vista +1.

Though details are sketchy at best, Microsoft had leaked some information on the next possible iteration of their Operating System. Dubbed (with the code name) Vista +1, the next MS OS is still a few years away, but could do away with harddrives and local storage all together. A presentation for an IHV (Independent Hardware Vendor) forum back in August suggested that Microsoft would be playing catch-up with a company named Citrix for the next three years.

Two years ago, Citrix introduce a system for streaming Operating Systems over a high-speed broad-band connection. The end user would use a simple PC (sans harddrive and or local storage) to run a small application in system memory. That application would simply help to facilitate the front-end GUI (Graphical User Interface) displayed on the users' desktop monitor. All calculations and computations would be performed off-site at the Citrix servers. Furthermore, all of the user data would be stored on the secure Citrix servers through systems of iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) and Ethernet Block Storage. The system can be described simply as remote computing, something that has been explored by Microsoft (and dozens of other companies) in the past. Coincidentally, Intel made a big push for the adoption of iSCSI as a standard for all NICs during their last Intel Developers Forum.

Though many companies have been tooling around with remote computing for some years now (take Google Apps for example), Citrix seems to lead the pack. The appeal of remote computing is the inherent security features it can provide. Since the streamed systems would be likely be running in virtual machines on some big main frame server system, it becomes impossible to infect the remote guest computer (which has no OS) with viruses or exploits. If the remote VM (at the server site) were to become compromised, then the infected virtual machine can be scrapped and a new virtual OS put into place, all without the end user being any the wiser. Additionally, large companies performing a service such as this would have security tools beyond what is available to the average consumer, not to mention the small army of IT professionals employed to keep the system safe and secure.

But oddly enough, Microsoft suggested that the first focus market for Vista +1 wouldn't be the corporate environment or big business, but rather that of the home network. The idea is to have a storage drive that could be used intelligently when attached to a home network. That drive would use a small embedded processor, or may be a dedicated server box, that could act as the central media server for the home. All programs and music files would be recorded and stored there. Additional functions such as encoding and trans-coding would take place there as well. The user would simply access that remote system through a virtual terminal or Remote Desktop type feature.

Could this mean the possibility of Windows Media Center Server Edition? If so, I'd like Microsoft to tell us just how many people have CAT5 cable strung throughout their house, because there's no wireless system that could even begin to handle the bandwidth required for streaming hi-def content. And don't even begin to mention 3-D gaming at this point. But perhaps they're not interested in streaming anything. Maybe the implied intelligence for this type of storage would be a system of DRM and copy protection for those television shows you've recorded.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), Microsoft has said that  "These features represent proposed plans but should not be considered plan of record for Windows Vista +1 ". It's certain though that remote computing (even if it became mainstream) would never and could never replace the stand-alone desktop computer. Furthermore, if a remote computing platform is developed, who's to say that the service provider wouldn't tinker and toy with your remotely stored files. It's quite well known that the layers of DRM that have been wrapped into Vista are simply there to protect the likes of Hollywood and the music recording industry. But what if one were to use a remote computing platform to download/store pirated material? Would the service provider be able to delete said pirated content? Could the service provider control the usage of specific applications (no P2P allowed over remote computing) and filter content (no porn allowed on our remote servers)?

That's all we need, Big Brother moving in with us. Thanks for the heads up Mr. Orwell.

Look out scum of the Earth, F.R.E.D. is coming to get ya!

Police have it hard these days; murder, assault, theft and all of those crimes that usually have some measure of physical evidence to back up the claims of wrong doings committed. But it's become increasingly common for criminals to dabble in Cyber-Crime; credit card theft, hacking personal information, child pornography, software piracy and so forth.

Well, the folks in blue have a new tool to help thwart digital villains. Meet F.R.E.D., the Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device. This pimped out rig being sold by Design Intelligence Forensic Solutions boasts some specs that more than a few case modders and hardcore PC enthusiasts will be interested in.

• 22 1/2" High (24 3/8" w/Wheels) , 9 1/4" Wide, 22 1/2" Deep - 70 lbs
• ATX Aluminum Server Case: 12 x 5¼", Dual Redundant 500W Power Supply
• Core 2 Duo Dual Core Motherboard with Intel 975X Chipset
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU (Dual Processor), 2.40 Ghz, 1066 Mhz FSB (Upgradeable on Request)
• 2 x PCI, 2 x PCI-X, 2 x PCI-Expressx16 Slots
• 4 GB DDR2-800 Dual Channel Memory
• Nvidia 7600 PCI-Express Video Card (256MB) with dual monitor output
• Dual 10/100/1000 Mbs Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapters
• 8 Channel High Definition Audio Controller with Dolby Digital Live Technology
• 4 Port (4 Drives) Primary 3.0 Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) Controller (RAID Capable)
• 4 Port (4 Drives) Secondary 3.0 Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) Controller (RAID Capable)
• 1 Port (2 Drives) DMA 66/100/133 Parallel ATA (IDE) Controller
• 8 USB 2.0/1.x Ports (4 Front Mounted)
• 3 FireWire IEEE 1394a (400 MB/s) Ports (1 Front Mounted)
• 2 FireWire IEEE 1394b (800 MB/s) Ports (1 Front Mounted)
• Ultra 320 SCSI Controller (Narrow, Wide, Ultra, Ultra160, Ultra320)
• Digital Intelligence UltraBay Hardware Write-Blocker:
  - Integrated IDE Drive Write Blocker
  - Integrated SATA Drive Write Blocker
  - Integrated SCSI Drive Write Blocker
• Digital Intelligence UltraBlock USB Write Blocker
• Digital Intelligence Integrated Forensic Media Card Readers - One Read-Only Hardware Write Blocked and One Read/Write (MSC, MS Pro, SMC, CFC, MD, XD, SDC, and MMC Memory Card compatible)
• 2 x 500Gb 7200 RPM 3.0 Gb/s SATA Hard Drives in Shock-Mounted Trays
• 2 x Native Shock Mounted Serial ATA (SATA) Removable Hard Drive Bays
• 1 x Native Shock-Mounted Parallel IDE Removable Drive Bay
• 1 x HotSwap Shock Mounted Serial ATA (SATA) Removable Hard Drive Bay
• 1 x HotSwap Shock-Mounted Parallel IDE Removable Drive Bay
• DVD ± RW/CD ± RW Dual-Layer Combo Drive
• 3½" Floppy Diskette Drive with Write Protect Switch
• Integrated Universal Imaging Workshelf
• 104 key PS/2 Microsoft Keyboard
• Microsoft Intellimouse
• 19" LCD Monitor with Built-in Speakers

FRED TAPE Option (add $950.00)

• DLT-V4 Internal Tape Drive (160GB Native / 320GB Compressed)
  Note: The hot-swap IDE removable drive bay will be eliminated from the FRED configuration to accommodate this option.

FRED INTERNAL 2.0TB RAID0 (1.5TB RAID5) Option (add $1,590.00)

• 4 channel PCI SATA RAID Controller
• 4 x 500 GB, 7200 RPM, 3Gb/s, SATA Hard Drives
  Note: The hot-swap SATA drive bay, hot-swap IDE removable drive bay and the Integrated Multimedia Card Reader bay will be eliminated from the FRED configuration to accommodate this option. You will receive the Read-Only Multimedia Card Reader in your toolbox.

Toolbox Containing

• Adapters, Terminators, and Cables: All the necessary cables, adapters, and terminators to image and process internal/external SCSI drives, 1.8 inch IDE (iPod) drives, 2.5 inch IDE (laptop) drives, and 3½ and 5¼ inch IDE drives.
• Digital Camera: Useful to document your suspects environment and hardware.
• Security Screwdriver Set: A varied assortment of popular security bits for opening computer enclosures that may have been locked down in a corporate environment.

Software

• MS-DOS 6.22 (Pre-Installed & Configured)
• Microsoft Windows 98SE Standalone DOS (Pre-Installed & Configured)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro (Pre-Installed & Configured)
• Suse Linux 10.1 Professional (Pre-Configured)
• Norton GHOST 10.0 & 2003
• Nero DVD/CD Authoring Software
• DriveSpy, Image, PDWipe, PDBlock, PART

Great Caesars Ghost! Honestly, with some Cyber-Cop hell bent on justice driving this beast those guys double swiping credit cards at some dime and dash fast food joint don't stand a chance. The RIAA will probably buy a couple of these rigs too, then take them over to the home of some grandmother and accuse her of pirating German Death Metal rock and promptly dissect her hard drives.

And if one (perhaps myself because I want it) were to buy something like this, it would make the best diagonistic tool ever. No more Knoppix boot CD needed to help recover files from my neighbors twitchy MacBook. Even 3 1/2" floppy drives don't stand a chance. The only thing that stands in my way is the $5,999.00 price tag. Well, at least it's under 6 grand.

I wonder if people will start using the old school 5 1/4" floppy disks again, just to be safe. That 1,200 KB of storage was pretty abundant for its day.

Toshiba has developed something called DTR which could increase HDD capacity ever further.

Apple may have added a few extra colors and some extra storage to their iPod lineup yesterday (read bout it here), but the a max of 160GB of capacity for the iPod Classic still seems kinda small, especially when half terabyte hard drive can be had for about $100 bucks and some change.

Toshiba, the exact same folks who developed the first 1.8" iPod hard drives have been playing around with perpendicular recording in the hopes of expanding drive capacities. The new method still uses the perpendicular approach (standing magnetic bits on end to increase aerial density of the hard drive platters), but uses something they've called Discrete Track Recording (DTR).

The method is simple; separating the parallel magnetic data-storing domains that are written upon the drive platter medium. To put that into plain English; leaving a small gap between the parallel tracks to prevent magnetic migration between stored bits.

The old technology on the left looks like a hammer and chisel when compared to the new.

It is quite likely that DTR will require higher density read/write drive heads, and an improvement of the magnetic medium that is electro-plated/electro-magnetically layered onto the platter (it's actually a big industry secret how they do it).



The DTR rainbow effect is totally worth putting a window in your hard drive.

So does this mean extra room for that already obscene collection of MP3's and movies pulled from the World Wide Web? According to Toshiba, DTR could yield a 50% increase in the available storage space for 1.8" portable media drives (like the iPod) and increased capacities for laptop hard drives. The extra storage space will also allow for added information that is never seen by the user, but still integral to drive function. That could encompass additional data to facilitate enhanced performance of the drive appature arm which moves the read/write head. There could also be larger sectors available for the FAT (File Allocation Table). Perhaps Toshiba could even integrate ECC (Error Checking and Correction) tools into the drives firmware. Such a tool could continuously monitor for dead or dying sectors and remap the drive structure to prevent data loss. An integrated defragmentation tool could be useful too.

Toshiba has said that this new drive technology is best suited for small storage uses. The DTR 1.8" portable media drives should be in mass production by 2009, with laptop drives following near there after.

But the desktop, that's what I'm waiting for! The 500GB drives are undoubtedly the best deal right now. There's a growing collection of 750GB drives available, and even a couple 1TB drive on the market. But can you even begin to imagine 2TB drives? Try 8 in a RAID0 array for 16TB worth of whatever you want. Music, movies, games, and to beat someone to the punch, I'll be the first to mention the XXX side of the Internet.

An Israeli storage company has developed a 1000 Gig, or 1 Terabyte optical storage medium.

It should tick off Panisonic and Sony, making both their respective HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats obsolete before that format war is even won. An Israeli company by the name of Mempile has developed a method of optical storage that uses two photons to read and or write data to a specialized disk.

The medium isn't of the conventional optical storage type of course, but uses polymethyl methacrylate. This material has the unique characteristic of being entirely transparent to certain wavelengths of light, such as the ones emanated by the laser diode in optical storage devices. This will allow for a disk with up to 200 virtual layers spaced only five microns apart. Each layer is capable of holding 5GB, much like a conventional DVD-R disk.

They do have working prototypes with a capacity of 600-800GB per disk, but they would really like to hit and possibly surpass the 1TB mark. Through their engineering and testing, the have determined that these disks should last around 50 years in the typical dark and cool storage environment suggested for all optical media. Pretty good since there have been studies that show how burned disks can in some cases become completely unreadable in only a year. Their final design should be completed 18 months from now and should be in the hands of consumers a year after that.

Dr Beth Erez, Mempile’s Chief Marketing Officer has indicated that the first units will use the conventional red-laser diodes that occupy all CD and DVD devices for read and write functionality. They do hope however to move toward a blue-laser diode which could increase the storage capacity to 5GB or more.

As for price, it's pretty steep. A read and write drive will likely launch with a $3,000 USD price tag, whilst each slice of media will cost around $30-50 bucks. It may seem expensive, but all optical formats have had this initial price gouge until the technology behind them becomes a little more cost effective to produce.

Just imagine; the 'Lord of th Rings' trilogy, 'The Matrix' trilogy, and 191 other movies on a single disk. Entire snapshots of your installed OS and every file within. A life time worth of MP3's. And since I know someone will mention it, I'll simply break the ice and say it right now; a couple dozen of these disks and every poorly shot porn clip on the Internet is at your disposal.

Phase change memory, still a fews years away, could become the fastest memory we would ever know.

Years ago, I had a stack of archaic 5 1/4" floppy disks (still have some for some old Apple II computers). Then, the slightly small, added capacity of 3 1/2" disks (there's dozens kicking around my desk at home). CD's and DVD's consume two boxes (I should sort them). And now I'm collecting thumb drives (four with 7 GB of storage in total).

But there may come one storage technology to defeat them all; Phase Change memory. Developed by the Lithuanian-American scientist Stanford R. Ovshinsky back in the 1960's, PRAM (a.k.a. PCM, PRAM, PCRAM, Ovonic Unified Memory and Chalcogenide RAM C-RAM) relies on the physical change of a material to hold data, rather than the conventional storage of electrons, switching of transistor like gates, or the magnetic mediums we are familiar with today.

Using Chalcogenide glass (a type of glass containing either sulfur, selenium or tellurium), it becomes possible with electrical currents to change the physical structure of the glass from crystalline (structured) to amorphous (non-structured), and back again.

Both Intel and STMicroelectronics have been working towards PRAM memory in the hopes of unlocking its distinctive advantages over that of conventional memory. Phase change memory has been clocked in laboratory settings at nearly 100,000 times faster than conventional memory specs. It also claims faster write speeds at 1ms to 10ns per byte of data. Furthermore, the MTBF (MeanTimeBetweenFailure) is on the order of 100,000,000 writes per sector, where as regular flash memory can only withstand 10,000 to 100,000 writes per sector before signs of failure.

There are a couple of short comings to Phase Change memory though. First, since it is made out of the same materials that comprise the recordable medium upon CD's and DVD's, the compounds used must be heated to 600 Celsius and above to create enough convection turbulence within the material to have it become amorphous. Furthermore, higher than normal voltages are required for both the read and write phase of the memory. Significant obstacles to overcome, but ones that can be greatly reduced with further refinement and research.

Perhaps Phase Change memory will never make it to portable devices such as digital cameras, thumb drives and media player. But there of course will be a home for it in PC's and Servers that demand faster memory performance. Now all that remains is for the chipset designers to increase FSB speeds to stay on par with future memory speeds. 

Sorry, the first Phase Change memory launch is still a few years away.

Windows Home Server is now in the hands of manufacturers, scheduled for a fall product release.

It should have happened years ago; the release of a simple server OS for the masses. Finally, the entire family can back-up their files to the home server, use it to stream music, and store those gobs of digital photos.

Microsoft has just released to manufacturers their Microsoft Home Server OS. This step comes roughly one month after Microsoft had released a candidate version of the new OS to testers. Over 100,000 people have tested what has been touted as the "coolest version of Windows ever", according to Windows Home Server Manager Charlie Kindel. Microsoft Home Server can be used on any home network to store music, files, photos, to provide backup storage for PCs connected, and allow for remote access from anywhere in the world.  

Based upon Windows Server 2003, it will be available as a standalone OEM software package. It should be compatible with most every piece of hardware out there, though Microsoft does recommend a 64-bit processor (for optimal performance), though 32-bit will do. Gigabit Lan Ports would sweeten the deal, though of course, many of us still get by on 10/100 base connections.

"It started with a vision that an always available device on the home network was an essential ingredient of a Microsoft platform for the home," said Kindel. "At first there was only one of us, then three, then five... We put together a plan for a plan and executed. The result was an ambitious, yet pragmatic product plan that would deliver real value to consumers."

The HP MediaServer, wrapped up in a very nice case.

Scheduled for a tentative release date of  "early fall, late September and early October", there are a number of manufacturer on-board for the launch. Some of worthy mention are Fujitsu-Siemens, Gateway, Iomega LaCie and Medion. But HP will be leading the charge with its MediaSmart Server, running with an AMD 64 processor and 750GB of storage space. Of course, many of us would probably want a terabyte or more of space.

"We'll keep moving forward," said Windows Home Server Senior Product Manager Joel Sider. "There will certainly be future versions of WHS."

Though pricing has yet to be announced, most would place the starting price of Windows based home servers like this at around $800 USD plus. Seems a little steep since you can throw together a pile of parts to build a Linux based server on the cheap. And will Wondows Home Server handle BotTorrent seeding?

It may be possible to store data to a hard drive using nothing more than laser light.

With the proliferation of digital media, massive games, and bloated operating systems, ample hard drive storage has become a must for the moder PC. Couple that simple fact with the HTPC's that are gracing the living rooms of people around the world. All of those bits and bytes that comprise your favorite television show take up a fair amount of space. But, unfortunate as it may seem, the lowly hard drive has progressed at a snails pace. Though advancements in read/write heads do allow for ultra high capacities, and the aerial density of the spinning platters is astounding, HDD's are still nothing more than magnetic record players.

Some technologies, such as solid state drives and RAM disks have taken data storage to new (though expensive) heights. Intels' Turbo Memory (a type of solid state memory drive) holds potential, but new mediums such as this are slow to adopt.

"Massive storage . . . with laser beams."

But a group of researchers (Doctor Evil isn't one of them) at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands have taken the first steps in storing data to a hard drive using nothing more than laser light. Through the use of lasers, they were able to write a single bit of data to a magnetic hard drive platter. The write process took all of 40 femtoseconds (a femto being a quadrillionth of a second), which is about 100 times faster than the write speed of your standard desktop hard drive.There have been attempts in the past to write magnetic bits using laser beams, but the ferro-magnetic that reacts with the polarized laser light source has to be of proper constituency. If said alloy isn't just right, it won't work.

It may seem like a breakthrough, but the method they employed required a laser about the size of a mini-fridge and up to a full kilowatt of power to produce that shot laser burst. Certainly, we shouldn't expect to see laser based hard drives on store shelves anytime soon, the methodology requires further refinement. For example, the read head is laser light as well. But the five micron point of laser light that is used to read the platter data is much larger than the footprint of current read/write heads. The research team is hopeful that with advancements in laser diodes they will be able to reduce the focused read/write beam to 10nm for those super high aerial densities. Further more, the pulse duration of the laser diode must be shortened significantly to allow for rapid read/write access times. There's also the complication of cooling the laser diode.

Perhaps we will have laser based hard drives someday. The current trend however seems to be that of fast solid state flash memory based drives, which can suffer from data corruption through excessive write phases. Todays hard drive technology will most likely never die. It's nice to have another option on the table.

Bit Torrent announces its new SDK for HTPC's and NAS storage.

Bit Torrent is without a doubt, perhaps the best way to share files. As it grows in popularity each and every day, it whats always been suspected it would take on a more integrated role in the realm of file transfers and downloaded content.

Yesterday, Bit Torrent announced their deal with Buffalo Technology (a well known manufacturer of wireless gear) and how they will be working together to provide an integrated Bit Torrent client for NAS (Network Attached Storage). This announcement comes in addition to the release of a new Bit Torrent client and accompanied SDK (Software Development Kit) for HTPC (Home Theater PC) systems. It would seem that we're on the fringe of a P2P Bit Torrent revolution.

Bit Torrent president and co-founder Ashwin Navin and director of communications Lily Lin had recently said Bit Torrent currently aims to narrow that gap between the Internet and the television by "focusing on devices that allow people to enjoy media in their living rooms." Bit Torrent obviously hopes that consumer electronics manufacturers will embrace the new SDK to offer embed Bit Torrent software on "set-top boxes, digital media players, routers, and NAS storage devices" and that they "expect one or all of those [devices] to merge with televisions in the future." However, Navin was quick to note that they don't have any plans to break into the mobile market at this time. I guess that means wait a year for a Bit Torrent Lite client to be loaded onto your cell phone.

With nearly 160 million installs on PC's around the world (Windows, Mac, Linux, you name it), Bit Torrent is quickly becoming the new P2P choice. Bit Torrent has also announced future partnerships with the likes of Netgear, Planex, Asus, and QNAP, in addition to chip manufacturers IAdea/Star Semiconductors and Marvel Semiconductors. And with the finalized Bit Torrent SDK, the list will begin to grow.

While discussing their dealings with Buffalo, Navin ( our friendly afore mentioned Bit Torrent rep) said "[the] NAS product line is one that has tons of storage, shipping terabytes. Running Bit Torrent means an always-on Bit Torrent that can be remotely configured to queue up downloads from Bit Torrent.com or any other place."

But perhaps the greatest advantage that can be forecast for new and improved Bit Torrent systems is the number of seeds they will provide. Anyone familiar with Bit Torrent will know the difference between 'Seeders' and 'Leeches', or supply versus demand. With terabyte capable NAS storage, Bot Torrent users probably wouldn't have any problem leaving their network storage drive on 24/7, seeding those files to the masses. And if Bit Torrent becomes popular in the realm of HTPC's and set-top boxes, then we'll be in for a real treat.

And if any of you budding software developers out there what to take it for a whirl, more information on the Bit Torrent SDK can be found right here. Go ahead, develop your little hearts out.

The gigabyte... Rest In Peace.

Don't get too used to using GB's to describe hard drive sizes -- the end is in sight for desktop hard drives offering less than 1 terabyte of space. 

If you are in the market for an extreme amount of storage capacity, you can now buy 1 TB drives from either Hitachi, Seagate, or Samsung. Seagate was the first manufacturer to announce that a 1 TB HD was coming to the masses, back in January. But Hitachi quickly followed suit, announcing their first 1 TB drive only minutes after Seagate said the word "terabyte", and was the first manufacturer to actually get the 1 TB drives to the marketplace.  

And now Samsung has entered the 1 TB club with their new SpinPoint F1 desktop storage solution.

These new 1 TB drives are all selling around the $400 mark. Here is are the 3 current 1 TB offerings:

If the entire history of computing is any indication, expect all this progressively cheaper space to be filled up with balloning file sizes. The first computer with a magnetic hard drive came out 51 years ago: it was IBM's System 305. It was a massive beast, weighing about a ton, and could store a whopping 5 megabytes on 50 24-inch platters. Now a days, platter size has shrunk somewhat!

Seagate launches their highest density drive platter yet.

Intel is pushing Solid State Drives, and MSI is adopting them.

Solid State Drives seem to be a pretty good idea. For laptops, they will of course benefit from the reductions in moving parts (spinning drive spindle no more) and the reduced power consumption) and lower power consumption. In the desktop market however, there seems to be little room for storage improvement. Lightning fast 15K RPM hard drives are available for those wicked fast seek times. Half terabyte drives give us increased aerial density, and thus improved performance. But SSD (Solid State Drives) a slow in the coming.

Intel has been pushing as of late a new SSD (that they will hope becomes a standard) that takes advantage of high speed flash memory and the PCI-e 1x slot (and I bet you though those 1x slots were useless).

Robson, the small SSD card infront of the MSI graphics card.

Dubbed Robson, this small expansion card can be built with any amount of flash memory (just 1 gig to start) and will cache those file that will help the computer to run faster. MSI is on board and is set to start bundling this SSD with upcoming motherboards (running Intel chipsets). The cost shouldn't extraordinary and probably won't send motherboard prices through the roof. The price of these expansion cards hasn't been released yet, but the extra cost will be offset by the extra performance.

Sounds cool, but Intel seems to be taking a back wards approach to Robson.

Robson is meant to hold the system Swap or Page file (the portion of the hard drive that the OS uses for virtual memory). It's a valiant effort, but with a seemingly lost cause. First, Intel has been showing the benefits of Robson when used on a laptop running a 5400 RPM drive. Secondly, by increasing the amount of available system memory (on the motherboard) to 2 Gigs or more, the need for a Swap/Page file becomes ever smaller. But the third and perhaps most important miss for Robson, is how it doesn't cache integral system files. If Robson loaded the Boot Sector onto it, that would increase performance. If Robson loaded the FAT (File Allocation Table) onto it, that could increase performance even more. But if Robson were to store all of the Directory Structures onto it, then seek times for files would be significantly reduced, eliminating the need for the OS to search for the location of a particular file, first scanning the directory structure (which is stored on the hard drive), and then finding that file.

Microsoft has already developed the OS infrastructure in Vista to take advantage of SSD drives, but nothing yet has been developed for Robson. Sure, Robson sounds great, but will probably die a quick death when real SSD drives start to flood the market.  

A new Intel BIOS feature will allow for complete backup and imaging of any drive, right from the BIOS.

In the past, many people (including myself) would use a third party app to backup or image a hard drive. There's lots of utilities to do this, but I've personally found that using a Knoppix boot CD or DVD is the best bit by bit mirroring method to date. Occasionally, Knoppix may not recognize the SATA controllers, or video card, but this is rare.

Now, Intel is coming out with their own drive backup solution. Motherboard manufacturer ECS has started showing off this Intel tool which resides right in the BIOS of upcoming Intel chipsets (though subsequent BIOS updates could bring the utility to older chipsets).

When in the BIOS, by simply pressing the F3 key (in the case of new ECS boards) the user will be given the option to backup or restore a drive image. Imagine, you can backup your entire partition to an external USB drive, or restore a drive image from said USB drive to your primary drive. The method eliminates the need for any third party apps and the subsequent application overhead they bring.

I'll bet that the folks at Symantic (creators of Partition Magic) are right ticked about this. There's no scheduled release date for this new feature as of yet, but expect it to make a debut in the near future. Great, more stuff in the BIOS to worry about.

Just what we need, yet another memory card format amongst the multiples that already exist.

Does the world really need another memory card format? According to the Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and the Multi Media Card Association )MMCA), yes we do.

The new format called the Micard (Multiple Interface Card) may just be another in a long line of mini storage solutions, but it does hold some interesting features.

In the most basic sense, it's just a memory card that can be plugged into a USB port, eliminating the need to lug around a memory card reader (they weigh hundreds of pounds and are really big, right?).

Sure, SD cards and MMC cards are nice, but there has been some oddities in terms of marketing and compatibility in recent years. Nokia resisted the SD card format for years, not wanting to pay a 6% royalty to the SD Association for every SD card they could have sold. Instead, Nokia chose to use the rival MMC format. Sony kept their Memory Stick Pro format quite proprietary for some years, and even charged consumers an arm and a leg for the readers. Thankfully, everyone and their dog now sells multi-format card readers.

So the new Micard proposal may help to stabilize the market even further. If it becomes a universal format, then hardware vendors should have no problem in adopting it. Furthermore, the plug and play USB port compatibility is a big selling point for consumers. Even better, transfer rates up to 480 Mbits/sec are nice, and the capacity range of 8 GB up to 2048 GB is even better. Of course, a 2 terabyte media card is a few years (if not decades) away.

In a press release, there was the indication that Micards will be compatible with MMC slots. "Passive mechanical adapters will be available to convert the miCARD for use in many of today’s products that accept full-size MMC cards," it says.

Currently, 12 Taiwanese manufacturers have signed up to start producing Micards. So far 12 Taiwanese manufacturers have signed up to the standard. The list includes Asustek, BenQ, Carry Computer, C-One Technology, Dbtel, Power Digital Card and Richip. As for using the new format in cell phones, it will have to wait. It's important to see if the new format is accepted by both the industry and the public. If it is, you may have to get a new cell.

Unfortunately, production isn't slated to start until Q3 of 2007 (only a few months away), so no one knows if the Micard will fit into the MMC form factor, or how it will attach to a USB port.

But wait, I think that I may have inadvertently bought a Micard when I took my time machine 6 years into the future ;-)

I have this very card in my digital camera, and it also doubles as my thumb drive. I tried to take a picture of it, but realized that I needed it in my camera to do so. Silly me :-)

This OCZ SD Dual card acts as a Secure Digital Card and a USB thumb drive. SD cards and MMC cards are roughly the same size (and Compact Flash way bigger), so physically adapting them to fit different devices should be easy.

Hmmm, Micard sounds neat, but it's not revolutionary by any means.

Wait, a quick update!

I found this picture of a Pretec Micard. Just another card, eh?

Fujitsu announces a breakthrough in hard drive storage capacities.

With all of the multi-media and high-def content our our computers, it only makes sense to have a tonne of storage space. Fujitsu has made me pretty happy with their latest announcement of a new drive head technology that could increase storage capacities by up to 500 percent.

Though it may still be in its infancy, and quite experiential, the new method relies upon a ultra high density drive head. This higher density drive head will allow for the reading and writing of smaller points on the drive platter. The new drive heads will also require a change in the ferro-magnetic medium used on drive platters, mostly to make the new read/write process more reliable.

But don't expect humongous hard drives until 2009 or so, it's going to take a while to perfect. I'd also expect that by that time, most all of the downloaded video content we watch will be in high-def 1080i with killer audio. We'll need that storage.

I simply pity the person who would try to defrag a drive of two terabytes or more.

Laptops could start running Compact Flash Hard Drives, neato!

I should get a laptop soon. I mean, there's the consideration of PC versus Mac, but that added consideration of the power consumption. And the biggest power sap in laptops is the 2.5" hard drive. That spinning spindle and twitching aperture arm draw a lot of juice. What if we could start using solid state storage on mobile computers.

Addonics Technologies is hoping just that with their latest range of CF (Compact Flash) Hard Drive Adapters. This little adapter will allow any laptop or note book computer (I wonder if it'll work with a desktop system?) to be converted into a solid state computer. The adapters come in a few flavors while boasting perfect compatibility with Windows, Mac, Linux and Sun Solaris operating systems. And because it's only a hardware bridge (no extra software and or drivers to install, no extra system bloat required), it looks and acts just like a regular IDE or SATA hard drive.

“With these new Addonics adapters any equipment, such as a notebook computer, that uses a 2.5″ IDE or SATA hard drive can be easily converted to use the more reliable CF media. Once installed, the CF card appears as an ordinary hard drive to the system BIOS and operating system and can also be configured as a boot device”. said an Addonics spokesperson said.

The greatest benefit for this being that Compact Flash seek times can put a platter pulsing hard drive to shame. Write times however, can be less than stellar. But this could help develop the portable computing market made make ultra mobile PCs evermore present in the marketplace. The cost is pretty nice too. There is a single slot IDE unit that rings in at about $24.99 USD, and a dual slotter IDE adapter for $29.99. The SATA version only comes in a single slot design and costs $35.99 US. And Compact Flash is getting cheaper by the day, at about $50 bucks for 4 Gigs, if you sniff around a bit.

Hmmm, maybe I could try building a small CF based PC, and just swap out different CF cards for the different OS's I want to run. This ones for Linux, this one for Windows, and this one for BSD. I could have multiple distros configured for different functions. It might make a great web surfing client. And if the install ever gets corrupted or infected, just re-flash from my main rig. Sweet!

Adtron introduces a line of solid state flash drives

It had to happen sooner or later.

With the increasing capacity of NAND flash chips combined with decreasing prices, it was only a matter of time before solid state "hard drives" made an appearance.

Adtron has announced three different 2.5" flash drives:

• 32GB 2.5"
• 96GB 2.5"
• 160GB 2.5"

All the drives share the following specifications:

• 2.5" form factor
• SATA interface
• "Adtron ArrayPro^TM performance engine"
• "Adtron EraSure^TM Data Security"
• Up to 65MB/sec transfer rate for reading
• Up to 55MB/sec transfer rate for writing
• 250,000 MTBF
• hot swap capable
• 3 year warranty

As the drives are pure solid state devices, they are far less susceptible to vibration than magnetic rotating media; and the drives are absolutely quiet. They also consume less power, and milisecond seek rates and rotational latency go the way of the Dodo.

Vistas Bitlocker can encrypt a hard drive, which should complicate things for law enforcement, but doesn't.

I hope no one out there has any incriminating files on their hard drive. Furthermore, if one were to have some potentially incriminating files on their drive, Vista might lull them into a false sense of security. Bitlocker is one of those totally new, never before  seen (as claimed by Microsoft, but known better by us geeks), you know you want it, data security methods developed exclusively for the Vista platform. Bitlocker is simply a means by where the end user can lock down their hard drive with some advanced form of encryption. Encrypt your entire drive with a password, or with a thumb drive holding the key. 

Sounds like a good idea only if you have secrets to keep. But this could harm users somewhat. Supposedly, Bitlocker is a very difficult encryption to crack. If it's so incredibly secure as Microsoft claims, it could complicate evidence gathering for for local, state, federal, and international criminal investigators looking to make a bust. Or will it?

Example: Some crook keeps a diary of criminal misdeeds on their Vista PC. The police break down their door one day, only to find that said criminal uses Vista's Bitlocker. If the system was switched on and running at the time of the bust, those forensic tech-heads can pull the evidence right from the OS desktop. But if it would happen to be turned off when the cops arrive, then cracking that encryption scheme becomes a thousand year brute force project, or a rubber hose wailing upon the suspect until they divulge the password. But not all is lost for the folks in blue. The police phone up Microsoft, flash their badges, and big Redmond FTP's them a back-door crack for that encryption. And I though that mailing out keys to anyone who claimed to be in law enforcement absolutely flew in the face of true security?

Of course, Microsoft claims that there is no hidden back-door. But of course, the addition of Intel's Trusted Platform Module (TPM), sets the conspiracy theories loose. TPM is nothing more than a chip that will store sensitive data, such a data encryption algorithms. Combine that with Trusted Computing, hardware that acts as an instructor or filter for and commands sent to or from the software, and those conspiracy theories are on fire. Finally, the fact that the NSA (National Security Administration) contributed security source code to Vista, and I don't know what to think. True, the NSA has contributed source code to OSX and Novells Suse Linux, but I tend not to trust people who spy on others for a living. Even though the NSA has stated that their contributions to Vista were in the interests of securing NSA systems running Vista, I can't help but get that feeling I'm being watched. Was it the NSA, FBI, or CIA that put those black boxes into every ISP so they could scan Internet traffic for buzz words like 'Bomb' and 'Atomic' and 'Weapon'? I do know that the NSA uses bots to monitor all Internet traffic outside of the United States, while claiming they don't peek at the bits of their citizens.

Security versus privacy? I just say don't keep incriminating files on your PC, obey the law, and fess up if you get caught. Or just just the open source tool TureCrypt. Aside from bing a very free and very strong encryption tool, TureCrypt will encrypt an entire hard drive and decrypt on the fly as you work. And for added security, it creates two different encrypted drive volumes. The first is a dummy volume that contains all of the files you wouldn't mind anyone looking at. It's password protected. The second file holds all of your secrets, and it has a password on it too. If you would happen to be in some situation where you were being forced to divulge your password, you could simply give your captors the password for the safe files. All of your secret files would look like random clusters to them. And there's always PGP too. 

Sun-Intel announcement may lead to significantly lower server prices.

Tuesdays announcement of the strategic alliance between Sun Microsystems and Intel has a number of implications for the marketplace - and while they are likely to be bad for the bottom line of server and processor manufacturers, it is very likely that consumers will benefit.

For the past three years, Sun (other than its various SPARC processors) has been focusing on using AMD Opteron processors in its servers. This has been a significant "prestige" boost to AMD, as well as helping to move significant numbers of Opteron processors.

Intel was not used by Sun due to better energy efficiency of the Opterons, although I am certain that the much higher memory and I/O bandwidth and better 64 bit performance were also part of the equation.

Now however, with this deal, the landscape at Sun is changing.

The new Woodcrest family of Xeon's from Intel, due largely to being a newer 65nm design, have better power consumption figures than the current Opteron lineup. Their integer performance, if not memory bandwidth bound, is excellent. Dual core versions on a Blackford chipset even partially get around the FSB performance bottleneck by having dual independent FSB's on the chipset with four memory channels - but all is not roses, as the cache coherency traffic must still traverse the chipset to reach the other socket, and Intel's decision to force the adoption of the very expensive lower performance FB-DIMM's by only supporting FB-DIMM's hurts the memory performance.

Regardless, a Blackford / Woodcrest dual socket dual core system has excellent performance per watt, and is a credible server platform.

Currently, the playing field is still severely tilted in AMD's favor once you get to four sockets or more, however that will not last forever - once Intel's CSI (their Hypertransport-like interconnect scheme to get away from FSB's) shows up, their multi-socket performance will increase.

What does this mean to you or me?

• Intel gets more servers out there, they have been getting clobbered by Opterons
• Intel has been pricing the socket 771 Xeon's VERY aggressively; you can by the same dual / quad core chips in their Socket 771 versions for a fraction of the cost of the same die's in Socket 775
• With this deal costing AMD its exclusivity with Sun, you can be fairly sure AMD will start chipping away at Opteron pricing
• With the AMD 4x4 platform being out, which is nothing more or less than their server Opteron socket 1207 processors re-badged as "FX-70/72/74" processors, and using non-ecc/non-registered DDR2 people will see low cost dual socket dual core platforms, inevitably leading to further erosion in the "server premium"

Servers will get cheaper.

Intel's, AMD's and every server manufacturers margins will get thinner.

Welcome to the world of commodity servers.

15,000 rpm server drive goodness

Sometimes speed is more important that storage capacity.

Seagate is addressing this market with their new 2.5" 15k rpm Savvio drives. The new drives will be available in 36GB and 73GB capacities, and have a blistering seek rate as low as 3.5ms.

Seagate points out that these draves are 70% smaller and use 30% less power than other 15krpm drives; and suggests using them in database, transaction processing and space constrained applications.