Ssd

Video: Recovering data from solid-state hardware

Scott Moulton explains how he recovers data from flash drives.  

Overheard: I’m declaring that 2008 will be the year of the thin client

Either HP sells thin clients, or someone else does. Sometimes, you have to eat your own children. IDC analyst Bob O’Donnell as quoted in HP Thinks Thin

I’m hereby declaring 2008 as the Year of the Thin Client. In 2008, laptop vendors will begin lining up ducks as we all get ready to move to the cloud.

Andy Greenberg does a really great job explaining why the time for the thin client is now.

PC manufacturers pay their bills by selling new machines year after year with ever more impressive loads of storage and memory. But as the U.S. economy sputters and companies transfer their IT needs from the desktop to virtualized data centers and to the Web, one computer giant is moving its enterprise products in a new direction: slimmer and cheaper.

The only thing I think he got wrong is when he said “one computer giant is moving its enterprise products in a new direction.” I think they all are. I also predict they’ll come up with a new name to replace “thin client.” It’s too 90’s.

Overheard: EMC to educate customers about using flash SSDs for big-iron storage arrays

SSDs have been around for decades while disk sales have surged. Using flash makes them more compact and power efficient than the older RAM-based models, but the concept is no different and the performance actually worse than RAM. What is different is that a major storage company is now going to actually educate their risk-averse corporate customers about the benefits of SSDs. Robin Harris, High-end flash drive goes mainstream

Overheard: Linus Torvalds looks ahead at 2008

One of the things I personally am really interested in is the move over to SSD (solid-state drives) disks. I’m a huge believer in reducing latency, and some of the better SSDs are changing the whole game when it comes to access latency, which in turn has potentially big impacts on the kernel — and while they are currently expensive enough to be a pretty minor player, that is certainly looking to change in 2008 and later. Linus Torvalds, Torvalds on where Linux is headed in 2008 (article by Charles Babcock)