Articles tagged with: storage

The folks over at Super Talent have come up with an easy route to upgrade you Asus Eee PC. Its Eee-tested SSDs are designed to replace the built-in SSD storage attached to the Eee's miniPCI-Express slot.

They come in sizes from 8GB to 64Gb with reasonable-ish read rates of 40MB/sec and write rates of between 15 and 28MB/sec. Read on for which models you can use them with.

Be it by blender, tree nailing or power washing and cement mixing we love testing gadgets to destruction. Now Samsung's also got in on the action by hurling one of its new Solid State Drives off a three storey building.

Click through for the video of how it got on and listen out for the soon-to-be new catchphrase of a whole series of copycat videos: "Will it boot?" Remember kids, don't try this at home - or at the office...

Intel has announced that it will be launching two new solid-state disk drives this year, with 80Gb and 160Gb capacities. The X18-M and X25-M are 1.8in and 2.5in SATA drives, respectively, and Intel reckons they’re capable of increasing “storage system performance” over nine times, compared to a traditional hard disk.

Both the Intel X18-M and X25-M SSDs are only available in 80Gb capacities for now, with 160Gb capacities following towards the end of the year. Intel claims that the 80Gb drives achieve up to 250Mb/sec read speeds, up to 70Mb/sec write speeds and have an 85ms read latency. Both drives costs $595 for quantities up to 1,000 – that’s around £4.20 per gigabyte, compared to a typical 2.5in hard drive’s cost of around 43p per gigabyte.

As explained in our review, a problem with the way in which some MSI Wind U100 retail units respond to a fully depleted battery means that they need a BIOS update straight from the box. The problem is that BIOS updates need to be run from floppy disk and the MSI Wind, just like the Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC, doesn’t have a floppy drive.

An external USB floppy drive is one option, but surely it’s easier to make a bootable USB flash drive and boot the netbook from that, right? Wrong. While netbooks (and most laptops) can be booted from a USB flash drive, the catch is that you still need a bootable DOS floppy to create one...

Laptops, media players, cameras and smartphones could soon have their capacities measured in terabytes, rather than mere gigabytes. IBM's revealed that it's developing a new form of memory using spintronics. It calls it Racetrack Memory - and it could boost current capacities by 100 times over.

If the 250Gb Iomega Ego isn’t quite capacious enough for your mobile storage needs, no problem – Buffalo has just the thing. Its new MiniStation TurboUSB trumps the competition by being the largest portable hard drive currently available – a whopping 500Gb. No larger nor heavier than other portable hard drives, the MiniStation TurboUSB’s increased capacity comes courtesy of the latest 500Gb 2.5in laptop drive technology – a Hitachi-manufactured 5400rpm SATA model with 8Mb of cache, in this case.

The ever colourful Inspiron 1525 now has one more shade to add to it's palette - and it's decidedly Blu. Dell's announced it'll be selling a Blu-Ray version of the 15.4in laptop for under $900 - and European versions are on the way too.

Western Digital has added a couple of models to its already extensive line-up of portable hard drives. The My Passport Elite comes in 250Gb and 320Gb capacities that cost £113.99 and £136.99, respectively, and both models have a “a luxurious, soft-touch finish” that we’ll interpret as “rubbery”. The drives are available now and the full press release is available for your delectation after the cut.

David Walliams (no, not him - we asked) writes: 

I have an old Panasonic Toughbook and after years of good service, the CD eject button has stopped working. The the drive on this model sits under the keyboard and the flip-up lid is under the wrist-rest.

The problem is that the tiny manual eject hole is on the underside and it's a pain to turn the laptop upside-down just to eject the drive. The drive works perfectly otherwise, so I'd rather fix it than replace it -- is there a way to eject the CD drive with software?

Good news -- yes, you can use software. Better news -- the software is free. It’s called AutoHotKey and you can find full instructions about using it to eject an optical drive after the cut.

USB flash drives may be more convenient to carry around, but if you’re looking for the best cost-per-gigabyte, a portable external hard drive is the way to go. Choose carefully, though – some drives are a little more than a 2.5in laptop drive slipped into a flimsy plastic box. Not so the Iomega eGo – this 250Gb drive is clad in metal shell so sturdy you can jump up and down on it with no ill effects.