Cody Taylor

Overall, the drive is a pretty good performer at a very attractive price.

So how fast did Ubuntu 9.04 boot with a solid-state drive? Really freaking fast. Like, “I can’t believe it’s already done” fast. Well, here, watch for yourself:

Solid-state disk (SSD) drive vendor Fusion-io set up a high-profile display of flash memory power at a trade show by displaying 768 DVDs video streams from a single SSD on a high-definition television monitor.

Flying under the radar of Tuesday’s broad desktop overhaul were quiet updates to Apple’s MacBook Pro notebook line, which now includes a faster 15-inch model, new high-end chip options, and larger solid-state drive (SSD) choices that are also offered alongside the company’s 13-inch MacBooks.

EmagGeek writes “Attempts by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create cybernetic insects (hybrids of biological and electronic ‘bugs’) have yielded ultra-low power radios to control the bugs’ flight and a method of powering those circuits by harvesting energy, according to research that will be reported this week at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. ‘Electrodes and a control chip are inserted into a moth during its pupal stage. When the moth emerges the electrodes stimulate its muscles to control its flight. I expect a run on bug zappers any day.”

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Intel celebrates its annual research show-off at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) with a look at upcoming Nehalem processors. The company is planning a “family” of processors with up to eight cores that will remain in the current dual- to quad-core power envelope.

Guide to your solid-state disk options, as well as how to get the best performance from your flash-based mass storage unit, with a look at Intel’s X25-M drive and offerings on HP, Apple, and Sony portables (InformationWeek).

mcgrew writes “New Scientist reports that a British team has overcome the obstacles to cheap LED lighting, and that LED lamps as cheap as CFLs will be on the market in five years. Quoting: ‘Gallium nitride cannot be grown on silicon like other solid-state electronic components because it shrinks at twice the rate of silicon as it cools. Crystals of GaN must be grown at 1000C, so by the time a new LED made on silicon has cooled, it has already cracked, rendering the devices unusable. One solution is to grow the LEDs on sapphire, which shrinks and cools at much the same rate as GaN. But the expense is too great to be commercially competitive. Now Colin Humphreys’s team at the University of Cambridge has discovered a simple solution to the shrinkage problem. They included layers of aluminium gallium nitride in their LED design… These LEDs can be grown on silicon as so many other electronics components are. … A 15-centimetre silicon wafer costs just and can accommodate 150,000 LEDs making the cost per unit tiny.'”

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theraindog writes “Although the solid-state storage market is currently dominated by flash-based devices, you can also build an SSD out of standard system memory modules. Hardware-based RAM disks tend to be prohibitively expensive, but ACard has built an affordable one that supports up to 64GB of standard DDR2 memory and features dual Serial ATA ports to improve performance with RAID configurations. And it’s driver-free and OS-independent, too. The Tech Report’s in-depth review of the ANS-9010 RAM disk pits it against the fastest SSDs around and nicely illustrates the drive’s staggering performance potential with multitasking and multi-user loads. However, it also highlights the device’s shortcomings, including the fact that SSDs are more practical for most applications.”

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