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A bargain SSD for the masses

Dave Farquhar Hardware August 29, 2011anandtech, apple, intel, kingston, NCQ, ocz, ramdisk, toshiba, Western Digital, Windows XP

I spotted a bargain SSD: The Kingston SSDNow V+100 96 GB is available at Amazon for $130. (It’s available other places for about the same price, but with Amazon’s free shipping, it’s probably cheaper there.) It uses a Toshiba controller that (by some accounts) lacks NCQ, but other than that, it’s a modern controller, and it has a good track record, having been the controller Apple used in its Macbook Air.
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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.

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Using ATA Security eXtension BIOS to add hard drive password protection

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security July 3, 2011July 3, 2011AES, intel, ocz

Most desktop PCs don’t have the ability to set an ATA password in the BIOS, precluding you from enabling the onboard AES-128 encryption in a drive like the Intel 320 SSD.

If you’re willing to hack your BIOS or burn a boot ROM to put in a network card, Arne Fitzenreiter has ATA Security eXtension (ATASX, or ATA SX)–a way for you to add that support to computers that lack it. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Hybrid drive options roll in

Dave Farquhar Hardware June 1, 2011amd, intel, ocz, PCI Express

OCZ introduced a hybrid hard drive, featuring 60 GB of solid state storage caching a 500 GB conventional hard drive, priced at around $350 and due in July. It’s on a plug-in PCI Express x4 card.

The idea has some merit.
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Dave Farquhar

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Intel’s and Sandforce’s AES-128 encryption is useful, but not for what you think

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security April 2, 2011July 3, 2011AES, anandtech, intel, ocz, passwords, TrueCrypt

I spent some time this week with a coworker looking into the AES-128 encryption in current Sandforce and upcoming Intel 320 SSDs, and we’ve concluded it’s no substitute for software full-drive encryption.

This is important, so we’ll talk about it further.

Dave Farquhar

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Intel and the SSD, 2011

Dave Farquhar Hardware March 7, 2011intel, marvell, micron, ocz

I saw and heard a couple of interesting bits about Intel and SSDs today.
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Dave Farquhar

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State of the SSD, 1Q 2011

Dave Farquhar Hardware February 18, 2011February 18, 2011anandtech, intel, marvell, micron, ocz

It’s no secret that I loves me some SSDs. And 2011 looks to be a good year for SSDs. Anandtech has a preview of what promises to be the fastest available drive on the market, once it’s released. It may not be at the very top of the heap for really long, but it represents the state of the art for now.

I’d rather not spoil the whole article, but there are two key takeaways from it.
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Dave Farquhar

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The SSD Decoder Ring

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 12, 2011July 14, 2017cheatsheet, jmicron, kmart, ocz, podcast, thumb drive, XT

I occasionally get a question about an SSD, usually when one goes on sale somewhere. Inevitably, I’ll get an e-mail message with a URL and the words “any good?” with it. Often I’ll know off the top of my head, but depending on whose name is on the drive, I may not.

But here’s a cheatsheet with all the major drives on the market, and who makes the controller in them. http://www.pcper.com/ssd
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Dave Farquhar

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What the 2011 CES may mean

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 7, 2011adobe creative suite, amd, CES, intel, netbooks, nvidia, ocz, pcie, windows 8, windows nt, x86

This week was CES, where companies make a big splash and try to show what’s going to happen in the consumer electronics space in the coming year.

In the coverage of CES, I saw three things that seem interesting, but only one of those three was a surprise.
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Dave Farquhar

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A free SSD alignment tool

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Windows December 29, 2010April 29, 2017command prompt, ISO, MBR, ocz, Parted Magic, raid array, vista, windows 7, windows 9x, Windows XP

We’ve talked recently about the importance of aligning your partitions on your SSD or your RAID array. What if I told you you could align an SSD or RAID array for free? Here’s where to find a free SSD alignment tool–it’s just not normally billed as such.

Alignment helps performance, sometimes tremendously, and it also dramatically improves your SSD’s life expectancy. Newer versions of Windows automatically align their partitions, but only if you do a clean installation to an empty drive. Older versions of Windows created their partitions starting at sector 63, for tradition’s sake. Maybe moving off sector 63 made dual-booting with Windows 9x harder.

Two readers, Jim and Xrocode, suggested utilities to do the job. One costs $30 and seems fairly automatic. One is free and requires a small amount of work. Grab the freebie here. It’s a 274 MB download, so it doesn’t even take all that long.

Dave Farquhar

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Upgrading an HP Mini 110 with an Intel X25-V SSD

Dave Farquhar Hardware December 19, 2010December 22, 2015firefox, hp, intel, netbooks, ocz, toshiba, Windows XP

I installed an Intel X25-V in an HP Mini 110 and found it to be an inexpensive way to hotrod an aging netbook. Any drive in my current SSD Roundup will work even better today. It’s an inexpensive way to hotrod an aging netbook. Any drive available today will be considerably larger than the stock 16 GB SSD, and also considerably faster. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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