PR:Intel’s 34nm NAND flash memory now featured in its Solid State Drives

High-performance storage for notebook and desktop PCs – now on 34nm NAND flash memory featuring the Intel® Solid State Drive (Intel® SSD) Toolbox

Intel® Solid State Drives (Intel® SSDs) represent a revolutionary breakthrough that delivers a giant leap in storage performance. Intel Solid State Drives are designed to satisfy the most demanding gamers, media creators, and technology enthusiasts. These new drives bring a high level of performance and reliability to notebook and desktop PC storage, at a fraction of the cost of the previous generation of Intel® SSD products.

Wait less. Do more

Why wait for a traditional hard disk drive to spin up? Unlike traditional hard disk drives, Intel SSDs have no moving parts, resulting in a quiet, cool, highly rugged storage solution that also offers faster system responsiveness. And for laptop PCs, the lower power needs of Intel SSDs translate to longer battery life and lighter notebooks. Higher performance with more durability means you can be truly mobile with confidence.

Better by design

Drawing from decades of memory engineering experience, and now on new, industry-leading compute-quality 34nm NAND flash memory manufacturing processes, Intel® Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drives are designed to deliver outstanding performance, featuring the latest-generation native SATA interface with an advanced architecture employing 10 parallel NAND flash channels equipped with multi-level cell NAND flash memory. With powerful Native Command Queuing to enable up to 32 concurrent operations, Intel Mainstream SATA SSDs deliver higher input/output per second and throughput performance than other SSDs on the market today – and drastically outperform traditional hard disk drives. These drives also feature low write amplification and a unique wear-leveling design for higher reliability, meaning Intel drives not only perform better – they last longer.

Featuring the Intel® SSD Toolbox with Intel SSD Optimizer

The Intel® SSD Toolbox with Intel® SSD Optimizer provides a set of applications to easily manage the health and optimize the performance of your Intel SSD. The Intel SSD Toolbox includes a powerful set of management, information, and diagnostic tools, and is designed to work best with 34nm Intel SSDs. The Intel SSD Optimizer utilizes the new ATA Data Set Management Command (Trim Attribute) to help maintain your SSDs performance at "fresh-out-of-the-box" levels, and is specifically designed to run with Microsoft Windows* 7. The Intel SSD Optimizer also works with Microsoft Windows Vista* and XP* operating systems as well.

Two options. No worries

Intel Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drives are available in either 2.5in (Intel® X25-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drive) or 1.8in (Intel® X18-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drive) standard hard drive form factors. And all Intel Mainstream SSDs are tested and validated on the latest Intel-based mobile and desktop platforms for your peace of mind.

Skype 3.0 adds video calling

Those of you that use Skype will be interested in the new release from Skype of its IOS release of Skype 3.0. We tried it out over 3G yesterday and while it was a little grainy and choppy was useable for basic communications on your iPhone 4 and 3GS and 4th generation iPod. While the image displayed is really grainy you can make out larger objects but if you need to send text you are better off taking a picture and sending it that way.

You can see the image to the right that the back camera from my iPhone 3gs can only do so much. This was a screen grab from my computer’s Skype communication box. You can easily flip your phone’s camera on and off but the receiving system needs to accept the image as well.

Captured Lunar Eclipse a real work of art

We have so many things that we can experience that brings awe into our lives and the movement of the Earth and Moon and their relationship to the Sun makes some beautiful art. William Castleman took a series of time lapse photographs and put them together into movie from the hour plus long Lunar Eclipse that occurred during this year’s Winter Solstice.

I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.

William Castleman’s vimeo blog.

Amazon rolls out Kindle lending support | ZDNet

Free Public Library Support is about the only major difference between the Nook and the Kindle now that Amazon has begun rolling out the capability to lend a book to a friend. It all has to be done through an Amazon Web Page but at least it is available now. You can now offer books up for lending and the recipient has seven days to accept, and they can borrow the book for up to 14 days once they accept the loan. While the recipient has the book on their Kindle device you will not be able to access it. You can check out the Amazon Help page on how to do this here…

Amazon rolls out Kindle lending support | ZDNet