That’s right, after my next hardware upgrade, I am going to be ditching hard drives. Seriously, why does my computer still have gears and motors in it? It’s not a freaking adding machine from Babbage’s lab. My transition away from hard drives will most likely happen in the next desktop that I build. I am going to be switching to solid state drives. There will still be a place for HDDs in a backup roll for me, but not as a device that my OS runs on.

Solid state drives (SSD) are rapidly falling in price, making them a reasonable cost for the performance gains. Most SSDs can achieve about 200 MB/s access speed. In a desktop, this can be dramatically increased by putting a few SSDs in RAID 0. I posted a video a few weeks about a guy that put 24 SSDs together in RAID 0, who got insane access speeds of about 2 GB/s. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to afford 24 SSDs (unless someone  donated some to me ), but I can see buying about 4 being practical in the near future.

Below is the results for an HD Tach test that I just ran on my laptop. My current 5400 rpm hard drive had just of 70MB/s peak access speed. I just can’t deal with these number anymore. Hard drives are by far the bottleneck in today’s computers with fast processor and memory. It is time to start ditching hard drives.

If you’re not convinced yet, check out this insanely quick boot accomplished by putting two OCZ SSDs in RAID 0. It’s not as impressive as the last video that I posted, but it is still pretty darn quick.

Last week, when I booted my computer up in the morning, there was a java update waiting for me. I entered auto-pilot mode and when the installer window popped up, I quickly accepted the EULA, and pressed next, next, next, until the install began. During the Java update, I was lucky that my quick reflexes were able to stop me from installing the yahoo toolbar, which is put into one of the steps pretty cheekily.

Why, Sun, do you check the yahoo toolbar option by default? Ok, I know the reason: money. Come on Sun, this is as low as prostitution. I am not even a big fan of Java in the first place. If it was up to me, everything should be written in each computer’s native architecture. But that is another issue.

So, Sun, would you please remove the yahoo toolbar from your java updates.

thanks,

Adrian

A few weeks ago, I was given the opportunity to review a second generation Zune care of matchstick.ca.

I have been living with my new Zune and using it on a daily basis. Before I received the new Zune, I was solely an iPod user. I have an old fourth generation iPod and a first generation nano. They have been very good to me as music players over the years and I was not quite sure about not using them for a while.

I decided to leave my pro-Apple bias at the door and see what the folks at Redmond produced for a music device. Here are my thoughts.

What’s good

For some quick stats, the Zune I received is an 8GB second generation Zune which retails for about $180 CDN. It is comparable to the iPod nano. It is very similar in features, except the Zune has a few extra goodies thrown into the mix.

The feature that I liked the most is the inclusion of an FM radio. The reception isn’t great in my basement suite, but outside it is crystal clear.

There were also a pair of Zune premium ear buds that were thrown into the bundle. These are probably the best pair of ear buds that I have used. The cord doesn’t get tangled!

What’s bad

The major complaint I have about the Zune is that it is a windows only device. This means no Mac and no Linux. I do have an XP box, but my primary machine is a mac. To sync the Zune, I was forced to use my windows machine. iPods work on windows; why can’t the Zune work on the mac?

The second pitfall is related to the first. The Zune forces the user to use Zune software. I do admit that the iPod also has the same problem and I would be complaining about how the iPod only works with iTunes if I was already an established Zune user. I guess that is the benefit of getting to the market first for Apple.

The Verdict

I would defenitely recommend the Zune to anyone looking for a new mp3 player. I wouldn’t, however, recommend this to established iPod + iTunes users, as it is quite a hassle to transfer all of your music and media to a new device. Besides this downfall, the Zune is a solid mp3 player and I will defenitely keep using mine.

The new search engine, Cuil, has had a hundreds of redundant stories written about it in the last week and I’m jumping on the bandwagon. I still don’t understand what all the fuss is about, as it is a terrible search engine. It has been produced by a few ex-google employees and is backed by lots of VC money.

I searched for the term “BMW M3 E92″ just to test out the new search engine. I was extremely disappointed  when I was presented with this screen below:

Google, however,  was able to find 1,180,000 results for the same term. What’s going wrong here?

My Macbook is almost approaching its second birthday and it has generally treated me well. Apart from the power cord, I haven’t had any physical problems with it.

Recently, however, the battery has just died. It no longer charges and the computer dies as soon as I unplug it. I have been searching throuh various forums, but none of the solutions that I have tried have worked.

Any body have any ideas?

I have many gripes with Facebook. My biggest is that they don’t allow for full resolution photo galleries. They even have the guts to try to get people to buy prints at crappy resolution. I have swallowed my pride and have pretty much come to terms with the uselessness of facebook albums.

Recently, I have been receiving a lot of invites to the the application “Watch this video.” This application is totally useless, and unnecessary. It only exists because a few developers wanted to jump on the Facebook application ad revenue bandwagon. What I don’t understand is how can people not see through this transparency of applications like this, and why don’t people just send links to youtube if they want me to watch this video. Having to install a Facebook application just to view a video is just crazy. That’s the end of my rant!

For non-seinfeld fans that didn’t understand the title: