Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"It could be debated whether or not the virus Morgan's flash drive picked up came from that particular photo kiosk but the people in charge of the kiosk acknowledge that the kiosks have no virus protection. All it would take for each kiosk to become a virus propagating machine then—with access to thousands of USB drives, memory sticks, and SD cards a month!—is exposure to one infected flash drive."

The world is a dangerous place; you never know where you might pick up a virus. To be honest, as careful as I sometimes am, I would probably not think that a photo booth kiosk as a place where I would be careful. I admit to having never used one as any photos I must print, I do so at home, but I see dozens of people using the kiosks all the time. Most people probably feel safe when surfing on a coffee shop's internet connection too. It just goes to show that you cannot be too careful when you expose yourself (or rather, your technology) to the public. But would one really want to live their whole life being paranoid of everything around them?

"Intel Corporation is moving to a more advanced, 34- nanometer (nm) manufacturing process for its leading NAND flash-based Solid State Drive (SSD) products, which are an alternative to a computer's hard drive. The move to 34nm will help lower prices of the SSDs up to 60 percent for PC and laptop makers and consumers who buy them due to the reduced die size and advanced engineering design."

Good news all around - Intel, who makes some of the top-performing soild-state drives on the market today, is moving to a smaller manufacturing process. This has the effect of increasing yields, and thus prices drop. Capacities are still the same at 80 GB and 160 GB - I really thought we'd see a bump to 240 GB by now - but these new drives will have a 25 reduction in latency; an amazing 65 microseconds versus the 4000 microseconds on a typical hard drive. Better yet, write performance has increased twofold - and the last-gen drives had a blistering 250 MB/s read speed, so these should push 500 MB/s for read speeds. That's mind-blowing performance!

The price drop Intel quotes of 60% is a little far-fetched though - the price on NewEgg for the 160 GB X-25M is $629 USD, and Intel is quoting the price in a 1000-unit lot as $440 USD; that's a difference of 30%, so while it's a nice price drop, it's not quite as good as Intel is quoting.

"Corsair, a worldwide leader in high performance computer and flash memory products, announced a new 16GB high performance “GT” Flash Voyager USB 2.0 drive. The new Corsair 16GB GT Flash Voyager USB drive will be debuted at the CeBIT 2008 Show next week in Hanover, Germany on Corsair’s stand (Booth 40 in Hall 21)...The new Flash Voyager GT USB drive provides data transfer rates that are up to 4X faster than standard USB 2.0 drives. Whether transporting office files, pictures or even full-length movies, you can “store-n-go” faster with the Corsair GT USB line. The drive has been optimized to take full advantage of its advanced flash controller technology as well as the screened and hand-selected NAND flash chips."

One of the biggest problems with high-capacity flash storage is that it's often rather slow - Corsair claims their 16 GB Flash Voyager GT drive will copy a 1.63 GB movie in 98 seconds, making that 16.6 MB per second write speed. If that's real-world speeds, that's quite impressive. The $169.99 USD MSRP isn't bad either, and when you factor in the all-rubber housing for durability, included TrueCrypt encryption software, and a 10 year warranty, you've got a compelling flash drive.