Cool Tech Reviews

Circuit City has a variety of bargains available in its 3 day Cyber Monday sale, but don’t expect super discount doorbuster specials. Examples:

Laptops:

• Acer Aspire AS5100-5023 15.4″ Widescreen Notebook PC with AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and Vista Home Premium reduced by $210 to $639.96.
• HP Pavilion dv6449us 15.4″ Widescreen Laptop Computer with AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and Vista Home Premium reduced by $210 to $739.99.
• Gateway M6817 15.4″ Widescreen Notebook PC with Intel Core 2 Duo T5250, 2 GB RAM, 250GB hard drive and Vista Home Premium reduced by $200 to $799.96.

Plasma TV - Hitachi 42″ Plasma HDTV Model #: HIT P42H401 reduced $300 to $1099.99.

External Hard Drives - Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 750GB External Hard Drive reduced $60 to $219.99.

There’s much more and note that they are offering %10 off on some items if you choose to pick them up at a local Circuit City store instead of having them shipped to you.

Staples has posted their Cyber Monday flyer and here are some of the deals:

Compaq laptop - Presario C712NR Notebook PC reduced $400 (with instant coupon) to $349.98. With 1GB memory, 80GB Hard drive, DVD R/RW with Double Layer Support, 15.4″ WXGA display, and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium, it’s a good deal.

External hard drive - Maxtor 500GB OneTouch™ 4 reduced $90 to $79.98.

LCD monitor - Hanns-G 21.6″ Widescreen HD Ready LCD Monitor with built-in speakers. Native resolution: 1680×1050. Reduced $150 to $149.99.

There’s more there and as usual with “Cyber Monday” deals, it isn’t tied to Monday and in fact started today at 6AM EST.

It’s not just processor prices that are heading down. Philipp Gollner at Reuters reports that Seagate CEO sees disk-drive price war continuing:

Seagate Technology, the world’s biggest computer disk-drive maker, expects aggressive moves by rivals to depress industry prices for another year, longer than most analysts predict, its CEO said on Wednesday.

Chief Executive Bill Watkins said Seagate was prepared to meet hard-disk drive price cuts by competitors including Hitachi Ltd. and Samsung Corp., who are hungry for market share.

“If pricing doesn’t drop for us, it’ll be an upside,” Watkins said in an interview

But good news for consumers.

Solid state, non volatile disk storage replacement has been a dream for a lot of years and while flash disks are finally killing the floppy, advances in hard disk technology have always kept the price per byte low enough that solid state didn’t have much leverage except for special use devices. That may be starting to change as laptop manufacturers have started introducing new models with flash disks instead of hard drives in some notebook models. Martyn Williams at PCWorld:

Sony will replace hard disks with flash memory when it launches a new model of its Vaio U laptop next week, it said today (June 27 - ed.).
…
Flash has long been eyed as a potential replacement for hard drives because it is lighter, runs silently, offers faster data access, and uses less power, but price has always been an obstacle.
…
The Vaio UX90 will come with 16GB of flash memory storage in place of the 30GB hard drive on the original model. It will cost around $1805, or about $345 more expensive than the disk-based model, and go on sale in Japan on July 3.

The UX Micro PCs look like a PDA on steroids, but they run Widows XP Professional and regular Windows applications as well as having some media player functionality.

Samsung Electronics launched a couple of PCs with flash storage earlier this month. The Q30 laptop and Q1 ultra mobile PC both use Samsung’s “solid state disk,” which packs 32GB of NAND flash memory into a case the same size as a 1.8-inch hard drive.

The Q1 is Samsung’s entry in the oddball Origami (AKA UMPC) tablet PC form factor developed by Microsoft and Intel, while the Q30-SSD (Solid State Drive) is a regular laptop:

Sammy just announced that their sweet, sweet NAND-based Q30-SSD we first got down and dirty with at CeBIT will hit the shelves in Korea (only) from early June onward. Yeah, it’ll fetch a steep $3,700 US-equiv (a roughly $900 premium) on that aging 1.2GHz Celeron M Q30 platform, but that 32GB of NAND reads 300 percent faster (53MB/s) and write 150 percent quicker (28MB/s) than normal hard drives while offering better protection against shock, 25-50% faster boots and sleep recovery times, longer battery life and reduced weight all in a completely silent, fanless package. Hoozah!

To which, I guess I have to add, ouch! The prices still have a way to go to attract the average consumer. More on Samsung’s solid state hard drive here.

It started as a news leak, but now it’s official:

26 April 2006 - Seagate Technology, the world’s number one hard drive maker, today surged to new levels of areal density and storage capacity leadership with the introduction of the world’s first desktop hard drive to hit the 750GB capacity mark. The monster drive is part of the new Barracuda 7200.10 family built on perpendicular recording technology to meet the growing storage capacity, performance and reliability requirements of desktop computers and low-end servers.

The new Barracuda 7200.10 family is now shipping to the worldwide distribution channel. With the introduction of these drives, Seagate now delivers perpendicular recording technology across its desktop, notebook, enterprise, consumer electronics and retail hard drives. The technology stands data bits vertically onto the disc media, rather than horizontal to the surface as with traditional longitudinal recording, to deliver new levels of hard drive data density, capacity and reliability. The new data orientation also increases drive throughput without increasing spin speed by allowing more data bits to pass under the drive head in the same amount of time.

The specs page has more details but here’s the net on the differences in the four models: ST3750840AS and ST3750640AS are SATA 3Gb/s with 8MB and 16MB of cache respectively while ST3750840A and ST3750640A are Ultra ATA/100 with 8MB and 16MB of cache. One wonders why they bother with the smaller cache size. In any case, what struck me besides the lack of estimated average seek time, was the 5 year warranty. Even better is the pricing:

Surprisingly, Seagate’s 750GB drive won’t carry a high premium, even though it’s first to market at this capacity–and using a new technology at that. In the past, many new hard drives have debuted at $1 per gigabyte; the first 500GB drives sold for $500 at launch.

The SATA version of the 750GB Barracuda 7200.10 drive, however, will debut at $590, which works out to $0.79 per gigabyte.

Speaking of prices, a little looking around the Web found the ST3750640AS already available for ordering at some vendors with prices ranging from $517 to $549 (at US vendors). As always, your shopping may vary.

Hitachi plans to roll out a new line of of high density 3.5 inch disk drives in 3Q2006 according to Tony Smith at The Register:

The Deskstar T7K500 and 7K160 will both contain platters spinning at 7,200rpm and connect to the outside world via at least 8MB - 16MB on some models - of cache memory and across a 3Gbps Serial ATA bus with native command queuing (NCQ). They offer an 8.5ms average seek time and a 4.17ms average latency.

The T7K500 will be offered in 250, 320, 400 and 500GB capacities. The first two have two platters, the rest, three, with four and six recording heads, respectively, and non-operating shock ratings of 350G and 300G.

The 7K160 will ship with 80GB and 160GB of storage capacity, both based on a single platter, and one and two recording heads, respectively. They too can withstand 350G of non-operating shock.

There will also be parallel ATA versions and all will have a three year warranty. If the Deskstar name sounds familiar, it is the old IBM brand continued from the days before Hitachi acquired IBM’s disk operation. There also will be a Cinemastar brand for the same devices which apparently just indicates their intended use in consumer electronics, presumably for video recording.