The new star in the SSD market is the Indilinx Barefoot controller, the only one that manages to provide very good performance while not being Intel or Samsung based. In fact, Barefoot is particularly faster than what Samsung has to offer and it even manages to surpass Intel's SSD offerings in some benchmarks. The most important one of them, random-write performance, is guaranteed at above 5MB/s - or 10x faster than conventional hard disk drives. Corsair decided to go forth and use the Indilinx as the basis for it's new Extreme SSDs.
If computer cases don't get 2.5" bays and SSDs don't got 3.5"... get and adapter.
This new product from Vizo is aimed at building personal computer's with up to two 2.5" drives fitting in a 3.5" bay. OCZ has already unveiled an adapter for its SSD drives, which is cheap at $12 but carries only one drive. This one from Vizo is more expensive, at $59.99, but can also be found by around $40 on eBay. It doesn't waste as much space but the price is steeper.
OCZ keeps pushing SSD technology forward with a new beta firmware for it's Indilinx Barefoot based drive. One of the problems that have gone unsolved, until now, by the best products in the SSD market - Intel and Indilinx based parts - is the inability to de-fragment the SSD once you've given it some use. Most manufacturers will not encourage you to run a file system defragmentation as this will shorten the lifespan of the SSD. There is good reason to do so and it will not solve your SSD fragmentation problems, since filesystem and flash fragmentation are different problems - the filesystem can't help the SSD since it doesn't know it's internal flash structure.
Typically, a used SSD will be slower and will have it's top sequential write speed drop to less than half of what it was originally and sequential reads will also take a considerable hit. It will still kick an HDD's ass but will be slower then when you bought it. OCZ has delivered a new beta firmware for it's Vertex SSD drives that performs background defragmentation of the SSD - meaning it will only do so when the drive is not doing any work - and can restore the drive to it's "as new" state in about half an hour, which is an excellent result. For anyone who is on the market for an SSD drive, the Vertex will be the drive of choice for some time to come. Intel has released updated X25-M drives but they still don't feature this kind of features and do loose out to the Vertex in some tests, less the random writes test, which is still an Intel advantage. Hop over to PC Perspective for the test.
After the release of the cheaper Indilinx Barefoot based Agility SSD, OCZ have announced a new product, the Solid 2 Series 2.5" SSD.
The peak performance of the OCZ Solid 2 SSDs is lower than both the Agility and the original JMicron based OCZ Solid SSD:
Read speeds(sequential) up to 125MB/s for both models
Write speeds(sequential) up to 80MB/s for the 60GB and 100MB/s for the 120GB model
The old OCZ Solid provided up to 155MB/s in reads and 90MB/s in writes and the Agility provides up to 230MB/s in reads and 135MB/s in sequential writes. Peak numbers mean nothing, of course.
The reason behind this slower performance, especially in sequential reads, is the use of cheaper NAND Flash chips. This is not a big problem, as the drive still retains the 64MB of cache of the other models and provides very good random read and write speeds. The background garbage collection functionality is also expected to be part of this drive's firmware.
The big problem of cheaper NAND Flash chips is reliability, which will in part be due to the number of low erase cycles that the flash chips can endure. This information is not provided by any manufacturer, but one can assume OCZ should be using lower quality chips on these cheaper drives. Problems may arise from this, although if well handled will "only" mean you'll starting to loose drive space and not data. Either way, SSDs have evolved much since the first Eee problems.
Last time I checked, the Solid had 5000 cycles MLC flash and some reliability problems, although the chips did have some extra spare internal blocks and OCZ was sparing some extra capacity for redundancy. Mine still works fine but I haven't given it much use - yet.
The Solid 2 will be a lot faster than the Solid due to the high random read and write speeds provided by the 64MB cache and Indilinx controller. The lower sequential read and write speeds should not scare you as the drive will still feel hugely fast, not any different from the Vertex unless you'll go and measure it.
A "Ki", or kibi, is the prefix for 1024, or a KiB, if we're talking about bytes. The KiB symbol corresponds to a kibibyte whereas a GiB corresponds to a gibibyte. The new prefixes are contractions of two words: kilo binary and giga binary.
This distinction between byte and binary bite is the reason why sometimes my posts have GiB instead of the more common GB, especially when referring to the systems or graphics card memory, where they are indeed MiB or GiB and not MB or GB. While I try to keep things right, I do sometimes interchange between the two.
Typically, hard disks come with capacities of multiples of 10 while anything with RAM or Flash related comes with capacities that are always multiples of 2 - like most everything in a computer, including 3 bits per cell NAND, which will yield a power of 2 number of values, 8 different values per cell.
Back in late 90s, I thought hard drive manufacturers were ripping me off by stating less actual capacity then what they were selling, these new suffixes didn't even exist but nowadays that situation hasn't changed, the world around it has. HDDs still come with base 10 SI prefix but manufacturers are being just plain honest, it's the rest of the world has still not woken up to the new reality of binary prefixes.
Let's have a look at a modern SSD, a new and mostly unused OCZ Solid with 30GB:
~ $ sudo fdisk /dev/sdcCommand (m for help): p Disk /dev/sdc: 32.0 GB, 32044482560 bytes
As we can see, the device actually has 32GB of FLASH memory inside. The label should have read "OCZ Solid 30GiB", right? Almost: 32044482560/1024/1024/1024 = 29.84375 GiB (the real) or 30*1024*1024*1024 = 32212254720 = 30GiB (the ideal)
One can't complain can it? While OCZ is selling the drive as 30GB unit, it actually has 32.044GB, or 29.84GiB.
It was nice of OCZ to do this and they also sell both Vertex and Agility models the same way.
When it comes to RAM, you're actually always getting something with MiB or GiB of memory and not MB or GB. Much of the data that gets stored on RAM is a multiple of 32bit (4 bytes) that gets written in memory, be it either the system's memory or the graphics' card memory. Information that is not, typically text, that is counted in characters each taking up one byte, is usually not.
So, much information is packed in multiples of two: textures in games are 512x512, 1024x1024, 2048x2048, etc. This is useful because pages in memory also are store in multiples of 1024, 4KiB and 2 or 4MiB. If you're not using a size that fit pages in an efficient way, then you're wasting space that could have gone better used but there are also other reasons for this.
One of the more common misconceptions on the IT and consumer electronics market is that there's only one measure of how a computer can store information. In fact, there are two: the SIprefix and the SI binary prefix. This new designation was standardized ten years ago, in 1999.
Flash is an example of a storage technology that should always come be counted with binary prefixes and not regular base 10 prefixes. Flash can either store 2 bits per cell, 4 bits peer cell or 8 bits per cell, in the above mentioned upcoming MLC chips. How can you then sell a device with precisely a GB when it's flashed based? It's not easy, hence the "not a Gigabyte nor a Gibibyte" actual measure of the OCZ Solid* storage capacity.
Operating systems, most notably Linux, have been counting information on binary bytes for some time and I've stumbled with ever increasing exposure to the new SI also on web applications. It's still too little but there's some adoption.
Starting today, Silicon Madness will also take that route and will only mention capacity by it's right SI. Even while as strange as a Gibibyte might sound, we won't restrain ourselves from using that term.
* The device hasn't got enough usage that I can believe the lack of space to make up 30GiB is due to lost space in damaged flash cells but more this actual inability to produce a capacity in base 10 from a base 2 type of device. Notice the last 4 numbers of the actual size of the device: 2560. 2560 is 1024*2+512.
This windows was made with xp pro service pack 0 RTM as the source disk,with Sp3 Build 5512 added.Default windows language ENGLISH/UK please change to your own language once installed as its a fully unattended install no need for any wga cracks with this one it passes online as fully Genuine the new cd-key is slipstreamed into the cd so no need to put when installing the updates (hotfixes) all hotfixes intergrated upto date October 2009 i burned the iso image with nero.. this will fit on a dvd-rom special thanks to tum0r for making the new directx 10 & 11 addon special thanks to ghost killa for stripped down xp idea's tcp ip = 16777215 uxtheme applyed.
ADDED:-
* Internet explorer 8
* Windows media player 11
* Firefox 3.5.3
* Kels runtimes 5.8
* Flash 10
* Java 6 update 16
* Shockwave 11
* Klite mega pack 5.1.0
* c++ 2005
* AMD k8 processor driver 1.2
* SetPoint 470
* Gamebooster 1.2.1
* Xfire 1.114
* Avg antivirus 8.5.392
* Winrar 3.90 regged
* Directx 9 October 2009
* Directx 10 new edition remade 'will be installed at end of t13 along with copying dx10 & dx11 files to system32'
REMOVED:-
- Accessibility options
- Briefcase
- Calculator
- Charmap
- Clipbook viewer
- Games
- Internet games
- paint
- Pinball
- screensavers
- Wordpad
- Cameras and camcorders
- Printers
- Scanners
- Tape drives
- Luna theme
- additional mouse cursors
- Movie maker
- Music Samples
- Speech support
- Tablet pc
- windows defualt sounds
- Frontpage extensions
- MSN Explorer
- Outlook express
- Windows Messenger 4.7
- colour schemes
- desktop cleanup wizard
- Search assistant dog
- Tour
- Fax service
Removed folders
SUPPORT,VALUEADD,DOCS,WIN9XMIG,WIN9XUPG,WINNTUPG.
so please do a clean install from system bootup with this windows cd disk. as this is not a upgrade disk.
Driverpacks base 8.12.5
* MassStorage 9.0.1 txt mode (sata + raid)
* Cpu 8.0.4
* Chipset 9.0.2
* Graphics A 9.06
* Graphics B 9.06
* Graphics C 8.12.1
* Lan 8.12.1
* Sound A 8.0.5
* Sound B 8.0.5
* Wlan 8.0.6
* Graphics A languages 9.06
* Graphics A physX 9.06
* Monitor 81022
* Sp3 hd audio 00002
* Wireless 00002
Need for SpeedSHIFT - new round in the history of the series. This part fits all lovers of realism in the races. Studio Slightly Mad Studios is developing a game for her shoulders, such as racing simulators GT Legends and GTR 2. In addition to the beautiful graphics inNeed for Speed SHIFT will be realistic accident and damage vehicles, which would give the game more realism. The fleet will include such cars as the Lotus Elise 111R, Shelby Terelingua, Audi RS4, Corvette Z06, Porsche 911 GT2 and Pagani Zonda F and others. InNeed for Speed SHIFT will be wiser AI which tend to make mistakes on the track, as we do.
