Hardware

The Samsung SSD 830: A user review

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , ,

I didn’t need much convincing to purchase a Samsung 830 SSD; I was in the market for a bigger SSD, and my short list consisted of Samsung and Intel drives. So when I found a good price on a 128 GB Samsung 830, I bought two.

The laptops I put the drives in aren’t able to fully take advantage of what the 830 brings to the table, but it’s still a worthwhile upgrade. I thought that two months ago when I installed them, and two months of living with them hasn’t changed my mind. Read more

The Dell Inspiron E1505 and its maximum memory

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Last year, I got a deal I couldn’t refuse on a Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop. It’s old and quirky, but modern enough to make it serviceable. It has a dual-core processor and SATA2, so you can put an SSD in it. It uses DDR2 memory, which isn’t as cheap and plentiful as DDR3, but at this moment isn’t unreasonably expensive either.

Its biggest problem is that it’s officially limited to 2 GB of RAM. Officially, that is. Read more

The new Nook partnership is a strange alliance

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Barnes & Noble is creating a subsidiary to handle its Nook business. And Microsoft is sinking $300 million into it, making it a joint venture.

Remember, last year, Microsoft sued B&N over its Android-based devices. And B&N put up more of a fight than anyone expected. Read more

What to do with an old laptop hard drive

Dave Farquhar Hardware

So you replace the hard drive in your laptop with a bigger model, or better yet, an SSD. What do you do with the old drive if it still works?

It’s good to keep the drive for storing backups or for extra storage when you’re working on storage-heavy projects. It’s a lot more convenient for both if you put the old drive in a USB enclosure. Read more

And speaking of SSDs, here’s how Oracle performs on an SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Andy Black is a former colleague and an Oracle DBA. Several times in the last few years, I ran into problems where I wished he wasn’t a former colleague, because my team got into some jams that I was pretty sure he could have fixed. (And let’s not even mention the time I got blackmailed into building an Oracle server.)

Last year, Andy did a thorough investigation of Oracle performance on SSDs, and observed very favorable results. Read more

SSD pricing may get more aggressive

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Cnet says an SSD price war is imminent as the major makers try to squeeze some competition out of the market.

This could cause SSD prices to deflate a little faster than expected. Read more

Intel enters the budget Sandforce market

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Intel announced a new low-end SSD today, the 330, based on a Sandforce 2281 controller. The popular 120 GB capacity will retail for $149. While not as cheap as OCZ’s entry-level SSDs, it’s within striking distance. Read more

Remember Plextor? Now they’re making SSDs.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Those of you who’ve been around as long as I have–which is probably most of you–will remember Plextor as the maker of the very best SCSI CD-ROM drives back when there was a market for SCSI CD-ROM drives. I had one, and I haven’t used it in years, but I relied on it, especially when I was doing A/V work. And it never, ever let me down. Read more

Speeding up an Acer Aspire One 722

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , ,

I gave my out-of-box impression of the Acer Aspire One 722 last week. It’s completely unacceptable out of the box, and adequate when you do some basic cleanup on it.

Now I’ve installed an Intel SSD in one and clean-installed Windows, and I’m much more impressed with it. Read more

Acer Aspire One 722 review

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

I set up an Acer Aspire One 722 netbook this week. This is my Acer Aspire One 722 review. I imagine the return rates on these things is horrendous, because the out-of-box experience is pathetic.

This one won’t be going back though. Tune it up, and it’s an adequate performer. It’s still a netbook–all that talk of the AMD C-50 and C-60 chips delivering Celeron-like performance was just rumor–but it can match an Atom’s CPU performance and delivers better graphics performance than Intel. Read more