SanDisk Corp. has shown off speedy solid-state hard drives at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The company’s new G3 series of SSDs will go on sale later this year with capacities of 60GB, 120GB and 240GB, with the 240GB model costing $499. The SSDs are designed specifically for notebooks, as replacements for traditional HDDs. SSDs are popular for notebook use because they consume less power.
SSD technology is coming along, and is expected to be the next major step for the industry. SSDs contain no motors or moving parts, consume less power and have the potential to offer significant performance advantages. Granted, the prices are still higher, and performance in the current SSD models falls short of traditional hard drives in many areas, but as the technology advances the prices will fall.
SanDisk claims that the G3 models are more than 5 times faster than the fastest HDDs now on the market, and twice as fast as SSDs that shipped in 2008.
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According to the UK police, a factory raid has netted pirated video games, DVDs and CDs with a street value estimated at £1 million.
30,000 of the counterfeit discs were seized from the factory in West Midlands, and there was an estimated 10,000 each of DVDs, video games and audio CDs.
Along with the discs, seven PCs were seized with 35 DVD re-writers, 19 HDDs, 15 Xbox 360 consoles and two Wii consoles. “Multiple” modchips were also found.
John Hillier, head of ELSPA’s crime unit added, “Piracy, like that of any other entertainment industry, costs us dear. Making good and inventive games is an expensive and creative process, with some titles today costing £20m or more to develop”.
“When a pirate sells illegally copied games they undermine the viability, value and creativity of our industry. The worst-case scenario is that pirate activity could cost the jobs of some of the UK’s outstanding creative talent and that would be a catastrophe”.
“The public should be aware of many other pitfalls of counterfeit games - some will even damage hardware such as consoles including PlayStation, Xbox and Wii. Other fakes will not play correctly at all”.
“Most importantly, of course, pirated software comes with no quality assurance whatsoever - so if a game turns out to be faulty then retailers and publishers just will not replace them”.
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Vudu has added a new feature dubbed the “Vault” this week, which will allow users to save space on their HDDs by “storing” any purchased movie they own on the company’s servers.
After “flagging” the movie as previously purchased, you can delete it from your HDD and re-download whenever you please at no added charge. You can also delete the file if you choose without flagging, but then re-downloading will cost you extra. Some content providers will not even allow archiving, says the company.
Other updates are “revised sort functionality, updated TV show search functionality, a revised advance settings menu, and a new Most Watched list, ranked by popularity among Vudu users.”
The company also added that an IR receiver kit would be made available for $39 USD allowing the device to be usable with universal remotes. Finally, the company also added that Vudu XL was coming, which is a 1 TB version of the Set-Top Box. The added space comes with a hefty price tag however, $999 USD to be exact.
