Buffalo intros world's first solid state NAS drive: quiet storage at a price

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We’re gradually moving to a world where devices that used to have hard drives in them are now sporting solid-state drives instead, but it’s still quite a hit on the wallet.

Take Buffalo’s latest device which it claims is a world first — a solid state Network Attached Storage (NAS) device that can be used to store all your multimedia files, is compact, reliable, has low power consumption, and is extremely quiet…

Seagate Fail part two: firmware fix breaks other drives

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Poor Seagate. Late last week, the news broke that their Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drives were failing en masse. Admirably, the company’s already published a firmware fix, but maybe they pushed it out a little too fast because it’s causing 500GB drive owners’ discs to fail en masse.

The update has been taken offline for the moment, and users of 1TB and 750GB drives are reporting successful updates, but if you’re on a 500GB drive and you’ve downloaded but not installed the update, then I certainly don’t recommend doing so just yet.

Seagate Forum (via Tom’s Hardware)

Related posts: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives: Epic Fail | If it’s not working, don’t smash it!

ECCENTRIC BRITISH HEROES: Neil Laughton driving/flying his Skycar from London to Timbuktu

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Adventurer and after-dinner speaker Neil Laughton’s customised dune buggy can fly. So he’s going to fly it – taking off from London this Wednesday, and landing/rolling up in Timbuktu approximately 42 days later.

The buggy comes with a detachable ParaWing (parachute/aerofoil thing) and has a fan on the back of it, allowing it to take off into the sky when it hits 45mph – and it can then cruise at 70mph at a possible and terrifying maximum altitude of 15,000 feet…

Toshiba will be showing off capacious SSD at CES

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If you needed any more evidence that solid-state-drives (SSDs) will be taking over from traditional hard drives pretty damn soon, then here it is. Toshiba’s developed an SSD that’s 512GB – twice the size of their recently launched 256GB model.

SSDs use fast flash memory for storage, rather than the traditional mechanical magnetic platter which is slower and more prone to failure. This particular drive uses 43-nanometer Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash technology to cram those gigabytes into a 2.5″ enclosure.

Tosh will also be offering 256GB, 128GB and 64GB drives, each in a choice of 1.8″ or 2.5″ enclosures.They’ll be available sometime between April and June, but they’ll be shown off at CES in January. No pricing info yet.

Toshiba (via Cnet)

Related posts: Micron Technology promises 1GB/s+ SSD drive within a year | Toshiba makes small thing bigger on the inside – 250GB SSD on the way this year

Nitrogen-infused golf club allows you to pretend to be John Daly

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This, ladies and gentlemen, is the PowerBilt Air Force One. It’s a golf club, and it’s full of Nitrogen. Why is it full of Nitrogen? I’m glad you asked. It’s full of Nitrogen because Nitrogen improves the ‘trampoline effect’ when the club makes contact with the ball, and allows the makers to produce a club that gives you optimum distance but retains a large sweet spot.

All in all, you’re going to end up with a drive like John Daly’s. The driver’s going to cost US$500, along with US$350 for a fairway wood and US$250 for a hybrid iron. I don’t know much about how much golf clubs cost, but that does seem rather on the expensive side. Still, for the longest drive in Golf, perhaps it’s worth it.

PowerBilt (via CrunchGear)