Archive for June, 2008

Samsung Terabyte Drive HD103UJ

Posted by Tom Settel on Saturday, 21 June, 2008
Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ - Hard drive - 1 TB - internal - 3.5\

Performance scores are one thing, but we are equally impressed by Samsung’s technical accomplishment in achieving the highest areal density to date on its new series of SpinPoint F1 drives. And at the top of the heap sits the SpinPoint F1, the company’s long-awaited drive that reaches an areal density of an astonishing 334GB per platter.

That’s right. The Samsung SpinPoint F1 sports a three-platter array, much to the likely embarrassment of its competitors in the high-capacity storage arena. Hitachi’s first-to-the-market 7K1000 drive has five platters, while terabyte offerings from Western Digital and Seagate split the difference at four. What is the benefits of this increased areal density? In a word: speed.

Samsung’s drive destroys all other terabyte models in many of the mission critical benchmarks we run,
including tests for average reads, writes, and real-world performance. HD Tach’s synthetic tests show the drive achieving read speeds of nearly 100MB/s, with write speeds swimming along at 84.4MB/s. On the real-world side, Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 cruised to victory in three of our fi e PCMark05 tests: an XP startup simulation, application loading, and general use, but the HD103UJ’s excellent write capabilities, it’s 14MB/s faster than the Deskstar, as reported by HD Tach that helped it overtake the Deskstar by almost 300 points on the overall score.

The Samsung SpinPoint F1 produced the slowest random access times of the three compared drives, but the effects of this and the drive’s slower burst speeds were never apparent during our real-world tests. Hands-down, this is the fastest terabyte drive we have tested.

Click for more: Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ – Hard drive – 1 TB – internal – 3.5\” – SATA-300 – 7200 rpm – buffer: 32 MB

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Chip giants unite for Flash replacement

Posted by Tom Settel on Wednesday, 11 June, 2008

A joint venture between two of the world’s largest chip firms plans to release a new alternative to Flash memory this year.

Numonyx, formed from the memory units of Intel and STMicroelectronics to commercialize phase-change memory, was created to commercialize Phase Change Memory (PCM), which is said to combine the read speed of NOR Flash and write speed of NAND.

PCM memory also degrades far more slowly than Flash memory and requires no erase cycle.

Phase-change memory works by using tiny heaters to switch cells of chalcogenide glass between a low-resistance crystalline state and an amorphous form with a much higher resistance.

Intel said in February that it had produced PCM cells that store two bits instead on one, which could make the technology price competitive with Flash for purposes such as solid-state disks.

Initial applications are likely to be in mobile phones but the technology is unlikely to go mainstream for at least two years.

Website: www.numonyx.com

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IBM Races To Create Faster Storage

Posted by Tom Settel on Tuesday, 10 June, 2008

The continuing evolution of processors tends to spark impressive innovation in other component areas, because no manufacturer wants its technology to be a data bottleneck in new systems. As such, the storage arena has made significant progress in recent years, particularly with solid-state drives, and now IBM is pushing that technology even farther.

IBM has released details on a solid-state storage technology dubbed racetrack, named after the technology’s penchant for racing data around a track. This technology could allow handheld devices to store 100 times more data than devices hold today, at a lower cost and using less power. These drives would also be much more reliable, because there are no moving parts.

“It has been an exciting adventure to have been involved with research into metal spintronics since
its inception almost 20 years ago with our work on spin-valve structures,” says IBM Fellow Stuart Parkin. “The combination of extraordinarily interesting physics and spintronic materials engineering, one atomic layer at a time, continues to be highly challenging and very rewarding.”

That challenge is likely daunting for Parkin, as spintronics is a sophisticated form of quantum computing that relies on spinning electrons to read and write data. Although storing information in magnetic domain walls has been researched for almost 50 years, IBM claims to have overcome obstacles of cost, complexity, and power by blending spin-polarized current with magnetization.

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Free Backup and Sync Software for Your Storage

Posted by Tom Settel on Wednesday, 4 June, 2008

Allway Sync
Sync files between your PC and an external drive, filtering by folder, file name, or file type. The program displays warnings about questionable files before syncing.
Link: www.allwaysync.com

DriveImage XML
Make an image of your entire hard drive for backup and restore purposes.
Link: www.runtime.org

FolderShare
Install the utility on multiple computers, create an online account where you identify each computer, and pick folders to synchronize. Up-to-date data becomes available on all those PCs whenever you make a change in a folder, with sync taking place in the background so you’re never disturbed, just happy to find your files wherever you work.
Link: www.foldershare.com

MozyHome Free
MozyHome provides automatic online backup for up to 2GB of your data
Link: www.mozy.com

PassPack
Pack away all your passwords in this secure online vault; it even logs you in to Web sites.
Link: www.passpack.com

SyncToy v2.0
Make sure folders across your networked computers contain the same files, even on drives that change location and name.
From download from Microsoft

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