Over at tgdaily they’ve posted about an interview with the CTO, David Flynn, of Fusion io talking about their new ioDrive. The ioDrive is a PCI Express card with 640 GB of flash memory that you can slip onto your motherboard to provide extra networked storage. The unit does indeed boast some impressive figures with a read rate of 800 MBps and 600 MBps for writing. Probably the single most impressive figure is the 100,000 operations per second which far out strips any standard HDD.

What confused me was that the claim by Fusion io that the tiny card could replace banks of hard drives. Err, I think not, with a 640 GB unit planned for early next year it’s certainly an alternative to standard HDDs but the implication is that it will save computing space. Whilst the max capacity is only 640 GB, I don’t think it will do that at all. Whilst I’m not going to calcuate the volume of a PCI express card compared to a HDD unit I think anyone can easily see that it’s going to be pretty close to 1:1 ratio on space used when comparing a 640 GB PCI express drive to one of the 1 TB HDDs out there at the moment. I agree that the io Drive will be able to serve files much more efficiently over a network but as usual a company has spouted off some marketing rubbish whilst ignoring the actual benefits of their product.

Another thing that annoyed me was the implication that their estimated cost at US$30 per GB would interest a lot of large organisations. May be it would but when current storage costs are around US$0.30 per GB any organisation investing in this storage technology would have to have some pretty serious file serving issues. So for the other 99.99% of the world (that’ll be you and me) we’ll be ’shackled’ with our oh so slow HDDs for a while yet!

Featured tags: flash drive Fusion io hdd ioDrive pci express

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As soon as I saw this PC I liked it. It’s the latest model from Gateway, the cow hide PC manufacturer, snazzily entitled the Gateway One. And I think with its radical design - yes I know Apple fans its old skool for you - it could be a winner. Within ten seconds of reading the specs I was already working out where I’d mount the monitor/PC on the wall in my office.

Anyway let’s put its looks aside for a moment and check what’s under the bonnet. The top of the range US$1,800 model sports a Intel® Core 2™ Duo T7250 dual-core processor, ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 2600 XT graphics card and 500 GB of SATA II storage in the form of a couple of HDDs. All models boast a 19 inch LCD widescreen display which also contains the processor, HDDs, a DVD drive, seven USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, a couple of memory slots and ‘hidden’ speakers.

The keyboard and mouse are both wireless and the unit boasts 802.11n wireless connectivity. So with one cable (yes just the one) you can connect this sucker up and away you go with your fully functional internet ready PC. As mentioned before the monitor/PC is wall mountable thus saving even more precious desk/floor space. The guts of the unit are easily accessible via a couple of latches situated on the back of the monitor.

So on paper the ‘One’ looks pretty good and certainly gets a big ten out of ten on design and space-saving. I do wonder how stable the unit is as on some side views of the monitor/PC the stand at the back of the unit doesn’t look that big, but hopefully the heavier components would have been placed at the bottom to enhance stability.

For the more frugal amongst us the bottom end model sports an Intel® Core 2™ Duo T5250 dual-core processor, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 card and 320 GB of storage but consequently sports a more wallet friendly price tag of US$1,200.

Featured tags: desktop gateway gateway one

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Just in time for Christmas, Sharp has released a couple of Blu-ray HDD recorders. The BD-HDW20 sports a 1 TB HDD and the ability to record to BD-R discs whilst it’s little brother the BD-HDW15 only 500 GB of HDD. I’m a bit bemused as to why Sharp have not offered the ability to record to re-writable BD-RE discs on these machines, their non-HDD recorders the BD-AV1 and BD-AV10 both sport this functionality so why not have it on the HDD recorders?

These puppies have a lightening fast 0.8 second start-up time, gold-plated HDMI ports no less, Dolby HD sound, i-Link connectivity and the 1 TB model can record up to 127 hours of glorious hi-def TV. Both units are able to record to lowly DVD-RW/R and DVD-R DL discs as well in case you wanna go ‘retro’ ;)

Unfortunately Sharp are only planning to release these suckers in Japan at the moment, on the 1st of December for the equivalent of US$1,730 for the 500 GB unit and US$2,600 for the 1 TB big boy. So come on Sharp give the rest of world’s hi-def enthusiasts some Christmas cheer and get these suckers on Santa’s sleigh.

Source: I4U

Featured tags: blu ray hdd recorder sharp

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The guys at Alienware have squeezed a couple of 320 GB 2.5 inch drives into their Area-51 m9750 and Aurora m9700 models. This makes these notebooks the first to sport such a capacity and if you were so inclined to have 640 GB of HDD space available you could squeeze in an amazing 163,000 tunes or 160 movies depending on what your passion is.

On the downside the Area-51 model weighs in at a hefty 8.5 lbs which doesn’t exactly make it a lightweight laptop but then who’s going anywhere when you’ve got so much music and vid to enjoy! It also sports a hefty price tag with a required US$2,400 just to get you the base model with 640 GB of storage. There’s a Solid State 128 GB option available too.

With the increase in popularity of external hard drives and their ever increasing capacity you may have thought manufacturer’s would have given up on trying to squeeze more capacity into a notebook but apparently not. So if you’re looking for a grunty notebook with copious amounts of storage you probably can’t go wrong with one of these offerings from Alienware. Oh yeah, deep pockets a requirement too.

Featured tags: alienware hdd laptop

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I thought I’d take a peek at the Samsung YP-P2, their latest offering in the touch screen media player arena. This little sucker is already available for pre-order over at Amazon. Here are some specs for you to inwardly digest

* 8 GB flash memory
* Bluetooth connectivity for speakers and headphones
* Widescreen 3 inch 428 x 240 res display
* 30 hours of tunes or 5 hours of vid from a fully charged battery
* FM radio
* Touch screen functionality
* Weight 2.8 oz

Sounds good? Well at US$250 it does sound like a bargain. But lets see how it stacks up against other well known models in the PMP market.

For an extra $50 you can grab an 8 GB iPod Touch which has a larger screen at 3.5 inches with 480 x 320 res but does weigh more at 4.2 oz. The iPod also only boasts a mere 22 hours of audio with a full battery but it does support Wi-fi connectivity.

The 8 GB iRiver X20 is floating around for $330 and of course has a microSD slot to increase its capacity so it may be a bit unfair to line it up against the others but here goes anyway! Its screen is a bit on the small size at 2.2 inches and is only slightly lighter than the Samsung at 2.5 oz so an extra $80 seems a bit much to pay for expandability.

So the Samsung doesn’t look too bad compared to the Apple and iRiver offerings, what do you think, or even better if there are any users of any of these models feel free to drop me a line with your thoughts!

Source: enGadget

Featured tags: amazon pmp samsung yp p2

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Western Digital have revamped their My Book range and added three new editions, the Essential, Home and Office. Each edition sports units ranging in capacity from 320 GB up to 1 TB and is aimed at specific users. The Essential Edition is a no nonsense plain jane storage range providing USB 2.0 connectivity. The Home Edition is aimed at the home user who is looking at something a bit more fancy with triple connectivity options of USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and eSATA plus automatic backup functionality. Whilst the Office Edition despite only sporting USB 2.0 connectivity not only provides the auto backup functionality but allows secure shared file access to the unit across a network. The Home and Office Editions also sport a capacity gauge for those of you who like that sort of thing ;)

All the drives are housed in similar sized boxes at 166 x 137 x 54mm and weigh 1.15 kg regardless of unit capacity with USB 2.0 connectivity providing the usual 480 Mbps. The Home Edition FireWire 400 gives users 400 Mbps with the eSATA connection pumping out 3Gbps.

The units are priced as follows - Essential Edition from US$130 (320 GB) to US$350 (1 TB), Home Edition from US$170 (320 GB) to US$380 (1 TB) and Office Edition from US$170 (320 GB) to US$380 (1 TB).

So there’s nothing new in terms of numbers but ther are a few extra bells and whistles that may just tempt you to take the plunge.

Source: PRNewsWire

Featured tags: extenal hdd hdd western digital

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Although there’s no official word from Apple as yet, in Walt Mossberg’s column at the Wall Street Journal he states

Also, some early iPod Touch units have had defective screens, where images appeared too dark. Apple says this problem affected a small number of units and is being remedied. My two test units displayed beautiful images.

during his review of the Apple iPod touch. Elsewhere there are many complaints regarding the iPods screen not displaying dark images and videos very well, the view is that they appear as if you are looking at the screen from an acute angle when in fact you are viewing it face on.

In fact the issue was highlighted over at iLounge in their own review and according to them some customers are being charged up to US$40 when attempting to return defective units along with the usual store staff attempts to blame the problem on customer high expectation or poor video encoding by the customer! Oh how I pine for the days when the customer was always right.

Come on Apple, sort this fiasco out, it was only a couple of weeks ago that you slashed the iPhone price by 33% in the US and had to placate the early-adopters with a $100 credit. Now you are trying to charge customers to get a faulty unit working. What’s the story?

Featured tags: apple ipod ipod touch

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