Computex 2011: SuperTalent Introduces SandForce Powered USB3 Stick

The very first enthusiast SSDs had their roots in USB drives. Memory vendors that were making USB sticks thought to put a bunch of NAND in parallel behind a rudimentary NAND to SATA controller and you had an SSD. Performance characteristics looked great on paper but of course there were teething problems.

These days the reverse has happened. High end USB sticks now look a lot like small SSDs. USB 3.0 SSDs were either too bulky to carry around or weren't that impressive from a performance standpoint, but SuperTalent just showed me one that is quite tempting. This is the SuperTalent USB 3.0 Express RC8, it's a USB stick that has a SF-1222 controller just like the previous generation of high end SSDs:

With four NAND devices on board, the RC8 actually has 8-channels feeding two die per package. Two channels are routed to each device, hence the use of BGA NAND vs. TSOP. SuperTalent uses 25nm IMFT NAND for the drive.  Performance as a result is quite impressive. Over USB 2.0 you're looking at a maximum of around 40MB/s, but over USB 3.0 you can hit 200MB/s with highly compressible data:

Worst case performance for incompressible sequential writes over USB 3.0 is still only 32MB/s thanks to the one-die-per-channel architecture (as well as inherent SF limitations). Read speed is still excellent however at nearly 180MB/s.

The performance characteristics make this drive less ideal for copying large compressed videos to, but great for general use. In fact, running/installing applications or even running a full OS environment from the drive is likely a pretty good experience. SuperTalent will offer the RC8 in 25GB, 50GB and 100GB capacities (with 32GB, 64GB and 128GB of NAND on board).  Expect availability starting late this month and pricing to be inline with standard SF-1222 based SSDs (~$110 for the 50GB drive). {gallery 1130}]]>

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HP DM1-3100 A luxury netbook powered by AMD Zacate

HP will soon market its netbook DM1-3100 running on AMD Zacate which by its characteristics, could steal the title of the most powerful netbook market.




Behind its questionable design, the new HP DM1-3100cache features decidedly upscale. The new HP netbook features a Zacate E350 AMD running at 1.6 Ghz running hand in hand with a graphics chipset Radeon 6310, all supported by a RAM 3 GB DDR3. This configuration allows you to easily enjoy your office and multimedia applications. The chipset is really light show by cons to handle the latest titles at the moment.

11.6-inch screen and hard drive 500 GB

The netbook HP DM1-3100 is equipped with a 11.6-inch screen displaying an HD resolution of 1366 x 768. We appreciate the hard disk with a capacity of 500 GB latter, rotating at 7200 rev / min, ensuring the entire operation fluid and responsive, providing a faster access time to your data. The audio is far from being abandoned with two onboard stereo speakers, a microphone jack and a headphone jack where you can plug in your headphones. We will not forget to mention
the integrated 1.3 megapixel webcam and the 6-cell Lithium ion battery providing a range of comfortable 6 hours.

VGA, HDMI and USB 2.0

Made for mobility with box measuring 29 x 21.4 x 2.1 cm and weighs 1.6 kg, the netbook DM1-3100 embeds a connector composed of 3 USB 2.0 ports, a VGA port, to a card reader SDHC / MMC, without forgetting the RJ45 port and WiFi b / g / n to connect to the Internet. This machine has an HDMI port in addition to stream HD video on a HD Ready TV or an external LCD screen. To our great regret, this netbook does not incorporate a USB 3.0 or Bluetooth 3.0.

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HP Announces TouchPad, Veer and Pre 3: All Powered by Qualcomm

We're here at HP's webOS 2.1 event in San Francisco. HP has announced a couple of big things today; a tablet (HP TouchPad), a (tiny) smartphone (HP Veer) and a professional phone (the Pre 3), all running the webOS 2.1 operating system.

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