Tag Archives: ssd

Computer, Media Blog, Technology

Are Solid State Drives Better Than Traditional Hard Drives?


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Over on our popular questions and answers site, bcgocubs asked how a computer will benefit when using an SSD. Also, they would like to know what everyone’s general opinions are regarding solid state drives vs traditional hard drives. A traditional hard drive has moving parts, but is quite inexpensive compared to an SSD. The solid-state drive is just that: suspended in a solid state with no moving parts. It may be more expensive to buy one of these, but many people are starting to believe that they are much better for your computer.

With a solid state drive, you’re going to have a lot more speed than you do with their counterparts. I personally prefer the speed of the SSD. There are measurable differences when you change over to one of these little babies. However, I had to pay through the nose to get one with some storage room to it.

It boils down to which is more important to you. If you’re looking for maximum capacity, you want a regular hard drive. If you want increased speed and performance, then a solid state drive may be right for you.

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Apple, Business, Communication, Community, Security, Social Media, Technology

Who Wants an iPad?

The Internet has been saturated today with content about the iPad. Everywhere you look (including here on my own site), you’ll find blog posts, pictures, videos and teasers. Some of the information was educational. Some of it was funny. Some of it makes me even more anxious for my own iPad to show up on my doorstep in a few hours. Nothing that I have come across, however, has been as entertaining as Robert Scoble’s tweet stream.

Robert got into line (first in line!) at the Palo Alto Apple store Friday morning at 11:00 AM. The Apple store there doesn’t open until 9:00 AM on Saturday to start selling the iPad. Yes, folks… that is 22 total hours the man will spend in line. My first thought was that he was absolutely freaking insane. As I read the tweets floating by, though, I began to realize how truly genius of a move this was. Not only is Scoble going to be the first at that store to buy the iPad, he’s also spending some quality time with some very cool people.

Reportedly, Chatroulette creator Andrey Ternovskiy is hanging out in the line. Not only is he coming up with new ideas for his service, he agreed to finally give in and join Twitter. There are a few venture capitalists milling about. Let’s hope several locals were smart enough to brush up their business plans and join the fray.

At one point, Will Park was streaming the show live – thanks to Scoble’s generator. Sadly, though, the Po-Po came and made Robert shut down the generator. That particular tweet had me laughing so hard I nearly had a “moment” I cannot share here. Sorry, dude… that’s just funny.

The point of this post isn’t to poke fun at Scoble, even though that is admittedly fun to do. The point, my friends, is to show you that hanging out in a line for more than 20 hours in front of a building is about FAR more than a buying a device. You never know who you will run in to – or what could happen – in line at the Apple store!

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Gadgets, Media Blog, Photos, Video

SSD Video Camera

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Last week, I uploaded footage of Wicket as I was testing optical image stabilization. That is a feature that is available on most cameras these days. I used the Samsung HMX-H106 to record that video… and will definitely be using it to record others, as well! It’s not as small as some of the cameras that I have, but the superior quality definitely makes up for that!

This baby features a 64GB solid state drive. Of course, it has a slot for you to add your own storage device as well… but why would you need to?! The 1920 x 1080 Full HD video means much greater clarity, brightness and detail than ever before. It also means that your video will be an exact pixel-by-pixel match for today’s very best large screen HDTVs.

It has 10x optical zoom, and shoots some excellent still pictures. I’m happy with the low-light capabilities of this particular video recording device, as well. It’s not often I find a camera that can handle cruddy light conditions well.

You can turn the image stabilization off or on with just the touch of a button. The camera also works perfectly well in extreme temperatures, high or low. Yet another huge plus for the Samsung is that it uses approximately eight times less power than a normal hard drive camera when reading or writing data. This means much MUCH longer battery life.

What type of video camera do you use, and why are you happy with it? What about it makes it the reason for choosing that particular model?

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Computer, Hardware, Media Blog, Technology

How to Speed Up Your PC

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PCPitstop is one of those resources you need, but don’t realize it until you need it! These guys have been around for nearly a decade now, and their reputation is rock-solid. They have a feature called “Ask an Expert” – and they’ve asked me to answer one of the questions. Candace is wondering how she can speed up her computer. She defrags regularly, and isn’t sure what more she can do.

There are several things you can do, Candace. Memory could speed things up, although there’s a law of diminishing returns. Since you didn’t mention a specific operating system, I know you’re running Windows due to the mention of running a defrag. If you’re using Vista – stop it. Spring forward to the Windows 7 beta, or roll back to XP. Even if you like Vista, you still have to realize how much of a resource hog it can be. The operating system is as important as the software you’re running on it.

Defragging is only going to help you so much. If your hard drive is full – consider cleaning it up. Store some of your videos, pictures and documents on a separate storage drive. If your hard drive is full, it definitely will not run at optimal importance.

Another option is to upgrade your hard drive itself. Consider switching from the HDD hard drive you likely have to a Solid State Drive. The problem could be due to the bottleneck speed of your current hard drive.

It’s difficult to guess at what will work best here, since I don’t know the full specs of the system. However, I’m willing to wager that the problem is bottleneck with the hard drive. I couldn’t believe how much faster my own personal machine ran after upgrading myself to the Samsung SSD.

How else can Candace make her computer faster? Let’s make this a community effort – if you have an answer to this, please feel free to leave your thoughts in a follow-up comment to this video.

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Communication, Community, Social Media

Why Isn’t the Whole World Stupid Fast?

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You know, I wish the World was stupid fast. You know what I’m talking about, right? Samsung makes a stupid fast SSD. There’s other gadgets and hardware and services out there that are stupid fast. Don’t you wish sometimes people would be stupid fast? How about a two-minute wait time for your next pizza? What about the customer service rep that solves your issue in mere seconds? Sadly, we know it won’t happen. But you CAN catch up with what everyone else is doing online in a quick manner! Just check out these links:

Hardware, Media Blog, Technology

Are SSDs Good for Gaming?

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No, there’s nothing wrong with this video or your computer! I was just being my usual dorky self. You know, your computer can run that fast if you have the right hardware. There will always be slow components, of course – usually your hard drive. That isn’t the case if you have an SSD drive though! You might remember a few weeks ago, I did a review of Samsung’s stupid fast SSD. I was just flabbergasted at how quickly everything ran on my computer.

A solid-state drive is something that has no moving parts, and is just stupid fast. Many of you went out and bought your own SSD drive, and are reporting to me that you can’t imagine going back. I’ve noticed so much of a speed increase on my computer since changing over to the Samsung SSD. Programs that use a lot of data – like my instant messenger program – are just lightning fast compared to what they were on a regular drive.

Many of you have asked ‘how is game performance on an SSD?”. Of course it’s faster and better! When you copy your game data over to your drive, you know that it’s going to have to read the information. The faster the read time – the more responsive the game is going to be. Game response on an SSD is great to phenominal. When you’re gaming, you want to keep rolling… so get an SSD.

Fine, don’t believe me? I decided to demonstrate using Need For Speed: Carbon. I’ve already copied over all 5+GB to the Samsung SSD. I chose a quick and easy race, since I’m not the greatest at playing things like this. Heck, I try though! What more do you want?

Remember, the game loaded from a 5GB app on the SSD… and it was ready within a couple of seconds. That’s literally all it took! Think about how long it takes you to load a game like this on your normal drive. You’re jealous now, aren’t you?

You know what you need to do. You need to get yourself an SSD today! Who knows what the future will bring… but the present is stupid fast!

Thanks again to Samsung for sending this to me. My life is just so much better now.

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Computer, Hardware, Media Blog, Technology

Are You Ready to Buy an SSD?

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What’s the bottleneck in your primary machine? For most people, it’s actually the speed of their hard drive. SSD is coming into its own, and can definitely clean up this problem for you. I received a review unit recently, and you can consider me a convert! Samsung sent the unit to me, and I have been flabbergasted at the results.

I’m going to be using this as my primary drive. My old drive was no slouch, but I could definitely feel the crunch when it was working. That’s less of a worry with SSD – there are no moving components. It’s insanely fast, I’m telling you. You’ll be amazed at the difference you’ll see!

I could put this into a notebook, but I’m not going to. I’m putting it into my Mac Pro. I’m going to keep the other hard drives that I had, and copy over files as I need them. Once I have everything off the old drives, I’ll format them and be done with them. I’ll have a pretty happy system, and I’m very much looking forward to installing it! My computer is going to be stupid fast!!!

Do you even know how fast your hard drive is spinning, and what your transfer rates are? I can guarantee that it probably doesn’t come close to what this SSD can do! This is a dream come true, and cutting edge.

If you want massive performance boosts, you need to take a look at one of these, for sure.

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Coupons, Hardware, Media Blog, Technology

Samsung’s SSD Hardware is Stupid Fast

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I recently purchased a Samsung SSD drive and put it in my Mac. I decided to try opening a bunch of intensive programs all at once to see how fast they would open. It is STUPID FAST!! All of them opened before I could even count to two!

So what IS a solid state drive? An SSD is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store data. An SSD emulates a hard disk drive interface, thus replacing it in most situations. They’re light, and they’re fast. This makes them ideal for laptops!

These drives have been around for some time, but it is only recently that they have started to become available through normal channels and even available to the average consumers; despite that fact they are still far from affordable.

Not only are they stupid fast, they’re completely silent. You’d expect to hear your hard drive “working” when you’re doing something, right? Not with one of these babies. They’re just totally and completely quiet. What a change that is!

If you’re in the market for something like this, I’d definitely recommend the Samsung. It works very well, and I’m absolutely happy with it.

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Hardware, Media Blog, Technology

How Fast is Booting from an SSD?

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Booting up using a Samsung SSD drive is stupid fast. I attempted to count how long it takes to boot – and didn’t even make it to two. I’m not kidding!

SSD stands for Solid State Drive. So why go with a solid-state drive? The main advantages are improved read and seek performance, a much better battery life, and awesome durability. The price tag is, of course, really high for these right now. But that’s always the case when the newest and best comes out. SSD prices will be dropping and capacities will be increasing over time like with anything else. Even though these are pretty rare right now, they’ll become standard before too long.

We have SSD deals and discounts aplenty, too.

As you saw in this video, the boot time using one of these babies is just amazingly fast. It’s also so quiet it could scare you. We’re used to hearing our hard drives grinding away during heavy work loads… not so using one of these! It’s just – quiet. Copying files and such is a little faster than when using other types of hard drives, but that’s an area that still needs to be improved upon.

As time goes on and I continue to run my machine on the SSD drive, I’ll be sure to let you all know how things are going. Thanks to the Samsung SSD team for enabling this experience!

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Coupons, Hardware

SSD Drive Deals

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Been getting tons of inquiries for Solid-state Drive (SSD) coupons. Haven’t been able to find any specific coupons, but I have put together a list of available SSD drives (and their prices) at Buy, TigerDirect, OnSale, Dell Small Business, ZipZoomFly, TechLoops, Mwave, Walmart & Geeks.

Just how fast is an SSD drive? Here’s a live demonstration of one of the new Samsung SSDs (now available on NewEgg):

Told ya.

Granted, not all SSD drives were created alike. Just because it’s an SSD doesn’t mean it’s going to be super fast (or super efficient). Check into the specs and watch your budget – get as much as you can afford. That’s a good rule of thumb when it comes to these things.

Would I ever go back to a traditional hard disk? Hell no.