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Intel enters the budget Sandforce market

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 16, 2012data compression, intel, ocz, ramdisk

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

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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Remember Plextor? Now they’re making SSDs.

Dave Farquhar Hardware April 9, 2012April 3, 20251990s, anandtech, apple, intel, kingston, kodak, marvell, micron, ocz, plextor, samsung, Taiyo Yuden, toshiba

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

Dave Farquhar

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Another questionable SSD bargain

Dave Farquhar Hardware March 29, 2012April 2, 2025amiga, amiga os, BSOD, intel, Micro Center, ocz, samsung

There’s a deal floating around on 90 GB OCZ Agility 3 drives for $80. But I’m not inclined to bite, for two reasons. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Egg on my face

Dave Farquhar Hardware February 12, 2012antec, corsair, debian, intel, kingston, Micro Center, ocz, samsung, tin

I dragged my computer back over to Micro Center this afternoon. It took three of us, but we got the computer working.

It’s a long story. It would have been a much shorter story if I’d remembered my rule #1. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say the second technician, upon hearing the only thing we hadn’t swapped out was the power supply, dragged a power supply out of the back. We plugged that power supply in, and heard the sweet gimme-some-memory scream from the motherboard failing to POST. Incredible. So we powered down, reinstalled the memory, and watched the system POST.

Dave Farquhar

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And now Intel’s teamed up with Sandforce

Dave Farquhar Hardware February 7, 2012April 3, 20251990s, anandtech, apple, intel, kingston, micron, ocz, samsung

Intel’s new SSD 520 uses a Sandforce controller. Very interesting. Both Tom’s Hardware and Anandtech have reviews posted.

So you’ll have Sandforce performance, hopefully coupled with Intel reliability. That’s the theory. They aren’t shipping yet, and you’ll pay a premium for the Intel name.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

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No, purchaser reviews on online web sites aren’t worthless

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized December 5, 2011April 2, 2025netflix, ocz, playstation

A magazine editor whose name I dare not mention pontificated this weekend that it’s never worth reading reviews on web sites like Amazon.

I expect more from someone with that job title–better writing and better thinking. There are times for words like always and never, but this certainly isn’t one of them. The reviews certainly have their uses. The trick is knowing how to read them.

Here’s how to wade through the muck, find good reviews, and use those reviews to find good products.

Dave Farquhar

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Deep Firefox SQL optimization

Dave Farquhar Software November 1, 2011August 10, 2016firefox, mac os x, ocz, os x, profiles, SQL, sqlite, Windows Explorer, x86

I was looking deeper into Firefox optimization, and I found Adventures in Firefox-places.sqlite. It’s a pretty intense analysis that goes beyond the usual simple, in-browser SQL vacuum that I’ve mentioned in the past. It was written with Mac OS X and Linux in mind, which is fine, but if you run Windows, you might want to do the same thing.

It has two benefits. It speeds up Firefox, and it reduces the amount of disk space your Firefox profile occupies. The two things are related; smaller databases are quicker and easier to navigate than large ones. As for why you should care about the amount of disk space it takes up, well, on an SSD every megabyte counts.

Dave Farquhar

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The mainstream places a bet on SSDs

Dave Farquhar Hardware October 27, 2011intel, jmicron, marvell, ocz, samsung, toshiba

I just saw that LSI Corporation bought Sandforce, maker of high-performance SSD controllers, earlier this week for $400 million.

LSI makes a lot of things. I’ve owned a couple of SCSI controllers over the years with their chips on them. I’ve administered servers with their RAID controllers in them. They also make system-on-a-chip solutions.

Dave Farquhar

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Bargain SSD? Maybe more like hard bargain SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware September 21, 2011November 22, 2018intel, kingston, ocz

Dealnews had a shocking deal today: An OCZ Vertex Plus 60 GB drive for $45. That’s an after-rebate price, but even writing off the $10 rebate, at $55 the drive is still priced historically low.

I didn’t buy one. And I didn’t buy three. Here’s why.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

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SSDs trend closer toward $1 per GB

Dave Farquhar Hardware September 18, 2011September 18, 2011kingston, ocz

In March, I predicted that we’d see SSDs selling for $1 per GB by late 2012. I’m happy to say it’s possible we may get there sooner than that.

In fact, if you shop around now, it’s possible to find USB flash drives for very close to $1 per GB, and sometimes you can get an SSD for $1 per GB if you find a sale. It will be short-lived, you can’t be picky about brand or controller, and you’ll probably have to deal with a rebate, but you can do it.

Dave Farquhar

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