VIDEO: See how fast SSDs can get

Most people know that the hard drive is one of the slowest bits in most modern computers, and we’re all eagerly anticipating the arrival of affordable, capacious SSD drives, but I hadn’t quite realized how fast these things were until I saw this video, from Samsung’s marketing team. Watch it above.

A set of 24 SSDs in RAID can open the entirety of Microsoft Office in half a second, the entire start menu (53 programs!) in 18 seconds, and can copy a DVD from place to place in less time than it takes to throw the aforementioned DVD out of the window. Best of all, the system can defrag in just three seconds. Impressive!

(via Gizmodo)

USA orders Sequoia – "the fastest supercomputer in the world"

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Not content with owning the fastest computer in the world, the USA wants to keep its title, so it’s ordered one fifteen times faster. The current fastest, IBM’s Roadrunner, is designed for 1.7 Petaflops, whereas the new one should be able to crank out 20 – that’s 20,000 trillion floating point operations per second. Impressive.

It’ll be packing 1.6 million processor cores, putting my quad-core to shame, and will be based on IBM’s Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. What are they going to use it for? Managing their nuclear weapons stockpile. Yes, they’ve still got that many. It’ll occupy 96 server racks over an area the size of a tennis court, and use 6 megawatts of power.

While they’re building it, they’re building a smaller supercomputer to build the applications that’ll run on the big one. “Dawn” will run at 500 teraflops. The only thing unspecified? How much the whole project’s going to cost. I suspect it won’t be cheap.

(via PC World)

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First photo of Hudson air crash surfaces on Twitter

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Score another one for citizen journalism. The very first photo of the plane crash in the Hudson was taken on a mobile phone, and uploaded to Twitter. The photographer was one Janis Krums, and he was on one of the ferries used to rescue the passengers from the stricken plane.

Although you could say he was in the right place at the right time, the quality of the photo is pretty damn good as well – well framed, and with plenty of detail. On a side note, though – you’ve got to wonder if it’s the first class passengers that are on the raft, while the economy plebs have to stand on the wing…

Twitpic (via Silicon Alley Insider)

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LG crams 4G LTE tech on a mobile phone chip

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future. While you were in bed this morning, dreaming of Konnie Huq running in slow motion in the snow, LG were hard at work in Japan (where it’s midday when it’s 3am here) putting ridiculously futuristic technology on a mobile phone chip.

The tech is called LTE, which (doesn’t really) stand for “the Long Term Evolution of 3GPP”. It’s basically the plans that the 3rd Generation Partnership Project has for the future of 3G and cellular broadband in general. Some people refer to it as 4G.

Micron Technology promises 1GB/s+ SSD drive within a year

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Micron Technology is an American company wthat makes various semiconductor devices – RAM, flash memory, etc. It’s just announced that it reckons it will be able to build a blazing-fast Solid State Drive before the end of next year that’ll be able to transfer data at rates of up to 1GB/s.

Currently, they’ve managed to hit 800MB/s throughput, and 150,000 – 160,000 random reads per second. They’re hoping to get that latter figure up to 200,000. For comparison, the current fastest-available SSD, from Intel, can do 250MB/s data transfers and just 35,000 operations per second.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that this tech will be in your laptop next year. It’ll take a little while longer than that, and initially only be available for servers, but if anything, it shows that the rapid pace of innovation continues in the world of flash storage.

Micron Technology (via Computer World)