Zit Seng's Superwall

Sounds impossible. But it is. That’s if you have about US$60K to spend on a PC. Yup, just one PC. Patriot built a PC with 40 TorqX SSDs and demonstrated copying a Blu-ray rip in 0.9 seconds. That’s really super fast. This is probably the year that SSD is going to come of age in consumer devices. It has been around, first becoming quite well known with its introduction as an option to the MacBook Air. It was too costly. The price has come down a lot. Perhaps by the end of this year, it might become competitively priced against a traditional rotating hard disk.

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My not terribly old 320GB Seagate hard disk thought it has worked hard enough, and complained through its S.M.A.R.T. interface about overheating, so I decided it was time to buy a new hard disk so that I can pre-empt potential problems. I learned that hard disks are awfully cheap nowadays. It wasn’t too long ago that my Maxtor OneTouch Plus cost over $230. I know, that’s an external disk and there are some overhead costs with casing, interface, power, etc. But hey, it seems an internal hard disk of 1TB size costs just a little over $100 nowadays.

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We bought a brand new branded computer. It came from a reputed brand vendor (or also called a system integrator). We would expect it to come with brand new components. One of them was a branded hard disk. The hard disk died. That’s nothing too unusual. Hard disks are one of the most likely components to fail because it is a mechanical part. However, we were in for a surprise when we removed the failed hard disk to do a replacement.

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I recently came into possession of a 320GB Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (i.e. it was given to me). It’s a nice little compact and light 2.5″ external hard disk, convenient for carrying around with a notebook. If they could have a 320GB USB thumb drive, that would be even better. But I guess until such time we make do with these external disks. There’s nothing really spectacular with the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with it either. It does what it’s supposed to do.

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I bought the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus from Comex last week. The 1TB model was selling at only $239 (was $309 the week before at Sim Lim Square). I had planned to get an external hard disk for my MacBook to put Time Machine backups on. Time Machine requires a separate disk to run on, and I’ve not had the chance to turn on Time Machine because I didn’t have a spare external hard disk available until now.

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My (wife’s) desktop PC at home started to act up. The boot hard disk was dying. This was a Windows PC. I didn’t want to re-install the OS and all the software, partly because I can’t find the serial numbers of some of the software I have already installed. So what I needed to do was to clone the dying disk to a new disk. How can I do the cloning?

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What’s wrong with “Made in Thailand?” It’s funny that we sometimes pass judgement on the quality of a product based on its country of manufacture. However, to see a “Made in Thailand” label that seems to spell an ominous warning, as if there is some danger that you need to be aware of, takes things to a new level.

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