Motorola Droid, CULV laptops, USB3 and all that HotHardware
The guys from HotHardware took their weekly jaunt on our lil' site to bring a plethora of info on news in the high performance / enthusiast computing world this week. To kick things off, Marco breaks down the latest performance tests on USB 3.0 and SATA 6G, Dave breaks down a "consumer level" $800 SSD with massive performance, plus two new notebooks running Intel’s CULV processors and a deep look at the Moto Droid.
Guests:
- Dave Altavilla , HotHardware
- Marco Chiappetta , HotHardware
OCZ announces 1TB drive for $2,200
OCZ, a solid-state drive manufacturing main-stay, has announced its first 1TB SSD, named the Colossus, will ring up at a wallet-gouging $2,200 pricetag when it ships in about three weeks. OCZ pegs the performance of the high-capacity drive at 250/MB per second reads with 220/MB per second writes. Smaller but similarly equipped capacities will also ship, ranging from 128 GB to 512GB, and cost $300 to $1200.
Lexar Media updates Crucial SSD line to 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB
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Lexar Media announced today that it would be updating its popular Crucial line of solid state drives. The new SSDs release today at $169.99 for 64GB and go up to $329.99 for 128GB and $599.99 for 256GB. These 2.5 inch laptop SSDs feature 250 MBps read and 200 MBps write speeds and support Lexar Media's Crucial SK01 external drive storage kit.
MacBook Pro firmware update locks out some third-party hard drives
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Apple recently released an update to the recently released 13-inch MacBook Pro which raised its hard drive speed from 1.5GB/s to 3GB/s, but now that same update has caused some third-party hard drives to stop working properly. Realistically, only users utilizing the fastest SSD units will notice a speed difference between the two firmwares, so users are advised to not upgrade till Apple fixes the issue.
New MacBook Pros announced at WWDC, Air gets cheaper
Despite all the rumors centering around possible new iPhone hardware, Snow Leopard release dates, and iPhone OS 3.0,Phil Schiller began his WWDC keynote with the announcement of some new MacBook Pro models and quite a few price changes.
First up was a refresh of the 15-inch line including the same lithium-polymer battery that debuted in the 17-inch model in January. The new battery is non-removable but lasts up to 7 hours, 2 hours more than before. Also, the barely-used Express Card slot was replaced with a much more useful SD card slot. This should please those of us with digital cameras (read: everyone!)
Available immediately, the new 15-inch MacBook Pros now start at $1699, $300 less than previous models. That price includes only the 9400M video option but does come with a generous 4GB of memory, upgradeable to 8GB. Processor speeds have been bumped up across the board as well with the slowest being an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.53GHz. Power users can get a 3.06GHz processor with a 500GB HD or 256GB SSD.
The 17-inch model was shown a little love in the form of a price drop to $2499, down from $2799. It retains the Express Card slot and gets a CPU bump to a 2.8GHz minimum.
Now onto the MacBook: It's gone! Okay, not quite, because the just-upgraded 13-inch white plastic model seems to be hanging around, but the unibody machine is now labeled a MacBook Pro to reflect a flurry of changes including the addition of FireWire 800. That's right -- FireWire is back! The port has been added, replacing the void that removal of the FW400 port created when the unibody design was released. Both the non-removable lithium-polymer battery and the SD slot made their way in the refreshed 13-inch, too.
A few changes were made to the MacBook Air, but perhaps the best news was in the price. The low-end starts at $1499 now while $1799 gets a 128GB SSD and a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo. The latter represents a whopping $700 price decline from the previous generation.
Toshiba ships (almost) affordable laptop with 512GB SSD
Toshiba's Dynabook SS RX2 will come with the company's own 512GB SSD, and run at the nearly affordable price of $4,000, though its cousin, the Portege R600-ST4203, also has a 512GB SSD and runs about $3,000. The solid-state drive future is almost here for regular laptop consumers!