It’s been a long week here at SlashGear with the build up to Christmas and Cyber Monday shopping and deals. We learned this week that the DoD had ordered 2,200 PS3 consoles to beef up their PS3 powered super computer. The PS3’s are cheaper than buying the Cell processors themselves it seems.
Users of the Intel X25-M and X18-M SSDs were not happy when they learned that the firmware update that promised to increase write speeds actually killed Windows 7 installations. Intel removed the firmware update that added support for TRIM shortly after the reports started coming in of the Windows 7 issue.
The weeks are just flying by, time change is this weekend so I hope you aren’t late for anything. The holidays will be here before we know it. This has been another busy week in the gadget world. HTC has confirmed that Android 2.0 smartphones are incoming and the HTC Dragon is the likely first Android 2.0 device to come from HTC.
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Intel have yanked their recent X25-M SSD firmware update, after users reported the new software killed Windows 7 installations. The update introduced TRIM support to the solid-state drives, together with boosting sequential write performance by up to 40-percent; however, some Intel support forum users have discovered that after rebooting their Windows 7 machine the new OS will no longer load.
Continued »Intel have pushed out their promised update to the X25-M SSD, along with the Intel SSD Toolbox and Optimizer, the standout factor of which is a 40-percent increase in performance for the 160GB drive. With the new 34nm X25-M SSD, users can expect up to 100MB per second sequential write speeds.
Having long been the preserve of expensive ultraportables or performance intensive media processing and gaming machines, SSDs are beginning to trickle down the price ladder. There’s still more GB for your dollar in a traditional platter-based hard-drive, but switching to solid state is cheaper than ever. On the SlashGear test bench today we’ve got Corsair’s 64GB P64 CMFSSD-64GBG2D SSD.
Well another week has come and gone as time steadily marches on and like every other week here on SlashGear, it has been a busy one. Poor old Toshiba took the old adage “if you can’t beat them, join them” seriously on Monday and announced that it would be launching its own Blu-ray player by the end of 2009. That had to be hard to swallow for the execs who bet it all on HD DVD only to be defeated by Blu-ray. Also on Monday the slick HP Mini 5101 netbooks tipped up starting from $399. I’m not convinced we need another netbook on the market right now personally.
It’s not the 320GB SSD tipped yesterday, but Intel have announced that they will be lowering prices for their solid-state drive range, having moved to more cost-effective 34nm NAND flash production. The shift could see SSDs reduced by as much as 60-percent for both PC and laptop OEMs and mainstream consumers.
The recently-released MacBook Pro firmware that promises to enable 3.0Gbps SATA connectivity has ironically been causing problems in third-party drives. Apple released the upgrade earlier this week, after users of the new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro models reported that the notebooks were limited to 1.5Gbps SATA; this did not affect the speed of standard-fit hard-drives, but may have limited future performance should the user upgrade to a faster HDD or SSD. Now, some users with third-party drives already installed are reporting frequent pauses, usage spikes and data errors with the new firmware.
MAINGEAR have released a new laptop, the MAINGEAR mX-L, a 13.3-inch machine with an LED-backlit 1280 x 800 display, a choice of Intel Core 2 Duo processors up to 2.53GHz and up to 8GB of DDR2 RAM. The mX-L also has a choice of up to a 500GB hard-drive or 160GB Intel X25-M SSD, as well as DVD and Blu-ray optical drives.
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