Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Twitter runs a little account @spam where you can send direct messages to point out spammers:

Name Spam Watch
Location Twitter HQ
Bio Suspect Twitter spam? Follow us and send a DM!

Today they’ve been quite noisy, inundating me with a flurry of poorly thought-out, and then corrective, text messages.

Hurray, I’m being spammed by the spam-reporting service….

Intel, hands down, makes the best solid-state disk drives you can buy. They offer two products, X25-M and X18-M, which offer up to 80Gb of SATA storage in a 2.5″ form factor–perfect as a notebook drop-in replacement. The drives support Native Command Queuing, and are rated to perform 3.3K writes per second, and 35K reads per second. They use very little power, and generate almost no heat.

Intel X25-M 80GB MLC Solid State Drive (SSD)

This is the result of benchmarking the Intel X-25M SSD with HD Tach. Notice that the sequential read speed is 220 MB/s, and that random reads take just 0.1ms.

This is the result of benchmarking the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s, an older 7200 rpm drive. It only attains 65MB/s sustained read, and 13.4ms random reads. The Intel SSD can read small bits of data over 100x faster than a spinning hard drive, and sustain a constant read rate over 3x the seagate. It’s those small reads & writes are what typically slow down home computers, as they need to constantly write small file for the operating system, file system, virtual memory, etc. With a hard disk, those writes impact the reading of other files, as the disk heads have to seek back and forth across the surface of the disk. With an SSD, there is no physical movement, and reads and writes don’t interfere in the same way.

If you’re interested in reading more, The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ not just compares all the SSDs on the market, but also goes into some detail about the underlying technology powering SSDs. They conclude that Intel’s SSDs, which offer incredibly low-latency random writes, offer the best value.

You can buy the Intel SSDSA2MH080G1C5 X25-M 80GB MLC 2.5-Inch 9.5mm Solid State Drive on Amazon for just $343!

Update: If you don’t understand how much better the Intel X25-M is than the competition, carefully looking at this just off the press benchmark against the new Corsair model should tell you. Why do you buy SSD? For fast random writes. Something the other SSD manufactors just do not get.

Apple’s new iPod shuffle sports a nice 4Gb of space for just $79, but you’d be a fool to buy it. Why? It no longer has any controls or buttons on the iPod itself, relegating those critical controls like “play/pause” or “next/previous track” to a new set of proprietary earbuds:

Small gets smaller.
The new iPod shuffle is amazingly small and even easier to use. The controls are now conveniently located on the earbud cord. It’s so easy, you can use it with your eyes closed.

So any shuffle buyers will be stuck with Apple’s crappy $1 headphones that come with it. Or, they can choose to shell out $79 more for a pair of Apple iPhone In-Ear Stereo headphones that will work in the shuffle. Either way, a losing affair.