Posts Tagged ‘hardware’

Solid-State Drive Technology Delivers Exciting Promises

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

While listening to “This Week in Tech” (TWiT), one of my favorite weekly podcasts (highly recommended), the conversation turned toward the current state of solid-state drives (SSD) and their availability and adoption in the market today. Already a number of notebooks and laptops offer SSD options; however, two major obstacles impede greater adoption: capacity and price. In an effort to maintain price point, manufacturers almost always offer the identical laptop but with a traditional hard drive for $600 less and triple the storage capacity. Who wouldn’t want to store more pictures, movies and music for less money?

SSD is a rapidly developing technology and as with all things tech, performance continues to increase and prices continue to drop. Already drive sizes matching traditional laptop drive size offerings from 160GB to 256GB are available; my MacBook Pro only has a 200GB traditional hard drive and had I an extra $700 burning a hole in my pocket, I would LOVE to get my hands on an Intel X25, an OCZ or any of the many other SSDs available on the market today as several users hungry to experience the increased system performance already have, albeit at a price premium.

So what’s so great about SSD technology that some people are actually compelled to pay the extra cash?!? SSDs offer several significant benefits that many users feel is well worth the price such as:

  • Major system performance increases
  • Significantly faster start up, standby/hibernate, resume/wake-up, reboot and shutdown times
  • Ultra quick application launching (literally 2 seconds, even for monster applications such as MS Office apps)
  • Increased battery life due to reduced power consumption (additionally, longer battery life means less recharging and fewer recharge cycles on the batteries means you don’t need to replace your laptop battery as often (every time I replace my laptop battery it costs me $150), and for those of us that never bother replacing our batteries, it means your battery will yield higher performance longer. Woot!)
  • Lower weight (after lugging my laptop to the corner coffee shop, I needed an adjustment)
  • Silent operation (no moving parts)
  • High mechanical reliability (again, no moving parts nearly eliminates the risk of “mechanical” failures. Additionally, failures occur less frequently whilst writing/erasing data, which means a lower chance of irrecoverable data)
  • No file fragmentation (the end of the hated defrag?! did you ever think you’d see the day!?)
  • Faster installation of operating systems and applications, and faster end user data restoration (IT folks love this)

As prices fall and capacities rise, SSDs will only continue gaining popularity, inching toward mainstream adoption with end users and IT departments alike and hopefully sooner than later. Meanwhile, the next time I have a chance to opt for an SSD over a traditional hard drive, count me in.

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Mainstream Mobility: Changing the Way We Phone

Friday, September 25th, 2009

As mobile computing becomes increasingly prevalent due to advances in virtualization and cloud computing, mobile devices will continue to relegate the desktop workstation computer to a quaint caricature of clunky inefficiency. Formerly thought to be cutting-edge, trendy toys, mobile devices have become developed, practical business tools. The future of computing is handheld.mobile device

Consider the cellular phone. Before Apple introduced the iPhone®, Internet enabled cell phones were limited to something called wireless application protocol (WAP). This was a very specific and minimalistic way of delivering web content to a telephone. The iPhone introduced to the realm of mobile devices the full-featured web browsing experience formerly reserved for conventional computers. Today, the Blackberry Storm and other similar devices offer full html browsers with Flash and allow us to seamlessly connect to virtual desktops.

With this technological progress, no longer are we limited to the boundaries of WAP, the limited number of websites that accommodated it, and the devices designed around it. Cell phones have now developed into full-featured mobile devices called “smart phones”, consolidating several separate technologies into one tool. We can check email, browse the web, access business applications, watch streaming video or television, dictate correspondence, download and store music, use moving-map GPS, and make phone calls, too. Almost every technological whim is now being bundled into a small phone. Widely and wildly popular with individual users, smart phones have gained recognition as effective business tools.

Migrating away from the desktop to two-pound laptops to ultra-light notebooks to the latest smart phones while leveraging virtualization and cloud computing technology, businesses now realize in one portable package performance and functionality that equals or exceeds that which was realized from desktop workstations. Untethered from computers the size necessary to carry bulk processing power, sales people, service engineers, and other remote users can access databases, business applications, and perform essential tasks on the fly, on a small phone, with the required processing power being handled elsewhere and delivered via the Internet. These phones can also remotely link to stationary servers and workstation computers back at home or in the office, offering the user operational access those computers as well.

As mobile devices sweep the market, the speed and functionality increases, the size decreases, and broadband communication providers strive to keep up with the ever increasing capabilities these devices offer, your business can benefit now.

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