Flash disks, SSD and the like have progressed a phenomenal amount over the last few years. This has led to a great many benefits. Ever growing storage for our phones and cameras, Panasonic now have there SD card digital camera’s. In the latest ACM Queue Magazine there is an article on the latest on the Flash NAND technology and what new devices are heading to market and no doubt sooner than later. Soon we shall see Flash with 64 times the density we currently have which will deliver 250GB on a chip. Now lets me see, isn’t a DVD standard format about 4.5, This could mean that on a USB drive we soon will have them with enough storage to store over 55 full length movies, or at least a couple of HD ones. The article is a bit technical for the layperson, however we are going to start to see some great innovation in this space. A Samsung disk spoken about is a 32 GB which has a PATA interface and will soon have SATA for quick installation to a regular home PC. Demands in this space will start to drive down the price of these disks, SATA will help that process along. So we might see SSD type disks with RAID inbuilt is one possibility. Our PC’s might get a new way of thinking. These disks could act as near line storage as with some innovation could act as a buffer between our slower hard disks and normal RAM, Mobile devices with a 250GB storage will alter the capabilities of portable devices immensely. A PC and thats anything slightly bigger than a Blackberry could have mirrored storage, The current devices like the Asus EEpc could potentially have 2 1TB storage units each of which have RAID 5 across 5 chips within each storage device, that takes the place of current SSD disks, yep still no moving parts

I am sure the storage vendors and PC and mobile vendors are way ahead of my thinking, and this will all seem a bit ordinary in a couple of years when the products come to market, but then I will probably need that sort of storage for my HD video camera in 2011.

See ya round

Peter

For those of you that follow the daily sagas of the MPAA and RIAA, you have heard of there attempts to shutdown file sharing systems. They have had some successes and a lot of battles, I am not sure they are any closer to solving the problems they have created for themselves with over priced music, region encoding, staged delivery of content and so on. The internet has caused them great headaches to try and maintain this regime. Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting project going on at University of Reading. A small robot is being controlled by tissue taken from a rats brain. It is hoped that in due course as they study this the scientists expect to make useful findings that might allow a better understanding of such things as Alzheimer's and other brain disorders Read the rest of this entry »

I guess by now most have read about this bug that is in the current release of VMware. It is a pretty stupid bug by all accounts, Read the rest of this entry »

A recent study by the NIH part of the US Health service, have found that people that take a power nap during the day might perform at a higher level. It might disprove that for at least some people, if they can power nap are able to operate for longer hours and still maintain a high level of efficiency. Apparently there is some good company around for the power nappers, Albert Einstein was one.

So I have put together a set of useful links for those that need to find more information to justify that short break in there day.

http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/jul2002/nimh-02.htm – Research done in 2002 by the NIH

This wikipedia link is very useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_nap

Another useful one that cites the newer NASA experiment in 2007. http://ririanproject.com/2007/09/05/10-benefits-of-power-napping-and-how-to-do-it/

Well I have to go and have my power nap

See ya round

Peter