Worm Geek

We are so used to associate the term “hybrid” with “cars”, that when I heard about “hybrid HDD” my first thought was “What? Electricity plus fuel!?!”

Actually the new Seagate hybrid combine the best sides of SSD performance and the low cost of classic hard disk drives. The new gamma is called Momentus XT and consist of 2,5″, 7200 rpm HDD plus 4 GB solid-state memory.

Task distribution between the two types of memory is implemented by Adaptive Memory technology, allowing to determine the file usage frequency so that most used files are moved to SSD part. This means that normally all files are stored on the hard disk, but if there are several requests for a file the system will automatically transfer it to SSD in order to achieve faster access.

There is yet another positive feature – Momentus XT does not require any additional programs. Estimations are that the performance of this type of hybrid drive would be about 4 times higher than the performance of standard 7200 rpm HDDs.

And of course the price of the hybrid will be most advantageous: 113, 122 and 156 USD for 250, 320 and 500 GB respectively. Asus has already announced that it will propose hybrid drives as an option in their Republic of Gamers (ROG) G73Jh notebook.

Puget Systems – the company that developed mini computers Echo I and Echo II, introduced the new PC from this line: the new computer with assumable name Echo III. New desktop has compact black corpus Lian Li PC-Qo8 with the following dimensions: 33.2 x 27.9 x 40.6 cm.

Dimensions of Echo III

The new little black box runs on Intel Core i5 or i7, mounted on Zotac H55ITX-A-E mini ITX motherboard with Intel H55 chipset. It has one PCI-E x16 slot and support up to 8 GB DDR3 memory. Puget Systems managed also to find space for a closed loop liquid cooling system, thus making it new computer not only small but also noiseless.

The Echo III mini-PC has 10 USB 2.0 and one RJ45 Ethernet ports, HDMI and optic audio outlets. There is an option for Wi-Fi adapter and Blu-ray disk drive.

Sounds like a powerful big desktop PC, but of course the price of cosines is not so small – basic configuration of Echo III with quad-core Intel i5 processor, 4 GB DDD3 memory, GeForce 250 video card and 500 GB HDD is about 1500 USD.

It has been quite some time since we started hearing the buzz around names like NVIDIA CUDA, Fermi and Tesla, but I guess it’s not that easy to see those in practice, retailing, still with all the rumors and hype around the it seems so difficult to forget NVIDIA’s promise: a promise to reduce the cost of supercomputers with up to 10 times!! This is the very same motto and it applies to advertising of the new Tesla 20-series GPU, who should come in the form of GPU PCI-Express Gen-2 cards too. According to the company, these video cards will be able to offer ray tracing and 3D Cloud computing at much lower price. Well we have all listened to those marketing messages more than once and "cheaper" for supercomputers is a concept of it’s own (talking about prices between $ 2,499 and $ 18,995). The series will be released in the second quarter of 2010. I would love to get one of those on my home desktop What about you?

The eMachines company presented their new EZ1601-01 nettop with some very original design solutions. First impression is that this is actually a desktop PC with monitor, keyboard, mouse. But than you realize that there is no desktop itself and it is the design of the nettop that makes it as comfortable to work on as on a desktop.

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Are you thinking about buying a DVD? Or maybe it is better to get Blu-ray? The answer to these questions might be the Mvix Ultio – media player with incorporated Bit-torrent client.

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A tiny desktop PC, although it may look like an appliance, but it’s a full PC that includes:

• 1.6GHz x86 CPU
• 1GB RAM
• SATA hard disk
• DVI with graphics acceleration
• High definition audio
• LAN and WLAN
• 6 USB ports

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First time I saw the description of the device I though “hah, they misspelled the company”. But this is not Logitech, it is actually another company called Logitec from Japan. Pretty tricky if you ask me. So Logitec announced production of this micro router.

The dimensions of this pocket size router LAN-WG/RA are 6.2×8.2×1.9 cm and weight of 55 g. Really tiny device that can be converted and used as access point. It supports the following encryption standards: WPA2(AES), WPA(TKIP) and WEP128/64 bit.

The company Fusion-io presented the fastest disk drive in the world. This is ioDrive Duo – a Solid State Drive (SSD), storage device created on the basis of flash technology.

The device is capable of incredible data transfer rate: 1400 MB/sec for recording and 1500 MB/sec for reading, while the access latency is less than 50 microseconds. This means that full HD movie copying will take about 30 seconds!

The ioDrive Duo is mounted in standard PCI slot and work with PCI Express x8 or PCI Express 2.0 x4 BUS interface. With use of coupled memory sticks a RAID-1 massive can be created from a single device.

In stores are available ioDrive Duo devices with capacity of 160, 320 and 640 GB, and the company promised 1,28 TB device by the autumn of 2009.

Yet the problem is with the price – 320 GB ioDrive Duo costs 14 400 $. But, as the history says, the prices of first classic hard drives were tremendous too.