I doubt desktops will go away, at least I will always have use for mine.
ASUS: 'We run out of hard disks at the end of the month'
ASUS managed a slight increase in profit for the third quarter of this year, despite the global slowdown in PC sales. ASUS is still shipping notebooks, but has also been strong in netbooks and has launched its own fondleslab range, all siblings to its popular Eee PC netbook, led by the Eee Pad Transformer, but to eventually …
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Monday 31st October 2011 22:33 GMT Ammaross Danan
Ultra
"Ultra" as in "ultra portable." They run a low-power x86 CPU, such as a severely underclocked mobile i7 chip to eek out as much battery life as possible, but the primary drive is portability and long battery life. The transformer comes close, but it is quite underwhelming in terms of processing power and likely gets lumped in with "netbook" at that point.
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Tuesday 1st November 2011 23:31 GMT Graham Dawson
The transformer is very netbookish but, as a hybrid device, it's a little hard to really categorise it as "just" a netbook. From the perspective of netbooks it looks like an ultrabook, but from the perspective of ultrabooks it looks like a netbook. And it's a tablet.
Neither fish nor fowl.
Must be why I love mine. :)
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Monday 31st October 2011 14:12 GMT Pete 2
Is this when SSDs take over?
With the end-user price of HDDs getting close to double what it was a couple of weeks ago, presumably a lot more people are viewing SSDs more favourably. Whether for cost reasons or simply 'cos HD lead-times are increasing (as will SSDs as demand ramps up).
Hopefully the increased demand for SSDs will drop the price as more suppliers increase production - or accelerate their plans for expansion - which will make them even more attractive, and HDs less so.
So when the HD makers do get round to drying out their factories, they could find that a lot of their lower-end devices have lost the market and that the only people wanting HDs in the future will be after the BIGGUNS: 1TB and up - even though it's a hard task to fill one of those puppies, unless you have an impressively sized "video" collection.
Although people scoff at small HDs it could be that they find the sizes of SSDs are more than adequate for their lappies, fondlies and desktops and when they get used to the speed of SSDs they'll be unwilling to go back to "slow old" spinning storage.
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Wednesday 2nd November 2011 15:24 GMT JEDIDIAH
Highly sub-optimal solution
> .. or they'll get external drives to add further storage when the price is better.
That tends to be a less satisfying option. Although upgrading internal storage could certainly be made easier. It's not that hard with most laptops as it is though.
It's strange that you have to be a geek in order to even be aware of "better usability" options.
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Monday 31st October 2011 22:34 GMT Ammaross Danan
Numbers
Unfortunately for everyone in the tech biz, consumers (read: mass sheeple) do not buy a product because it's labeled as "fast" or "gamer edition," they lie to themselves they know what they're looking at and buy the item with the biggest numbers. 2.53GHz is better than 2.1GHz. 6GB of RAM over 4GB of RAM. Webcam vs no webcam. And the kicker: 1TB (1000 GB) over the 120GB SSD. This is why SSDs don't do well on the Best Buy shelf: uneducated masses thinking it's worse because it doesn't have a big number. They have no idea what "sequential write speed" means, let alone "IOPS."
If you want something less grey-area to argue with, SSDs are still far more expensive per GB than HDDs. Even if a 1TB drive costs $120, that's still $0.12/GB as opposed to $1.25+/GB of SSDs. Horses for courses and all that.
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Wednesday 2nd November 2011 15:24 GMT JEDIDIAH
Size doesn't matter so much anymore...
There is a practical lower bound price on components. Certain manufacturers aren't interested in selling the cheaper gear. So once you get to a certain price point, things don't get cheaper anymore. You just end up with "better" components. That means that it becomes increasingly harder to find small hard drives or even reasons to buy them.
Before this flood, there was very little price difference between the smallest spinny drive you could get and a much bigger one.
SSDs are still puny. It's easy enough to overwhelm them with just music and family photos. You don't even need to get into various forms of video hoarding. The gap between SSD and spinny disk capacity is simply too wide.
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Tuesday 1st November 2011 23:31 GMT Graham Dawson
I had one SSD drop dead on me in a week - catastrophic total failure. One minute it was working, next it wasn't and I couldn't get a single bit off it. The replacement - exactly the same make and model - performed flawlessly. Is this typical? Maybe. I can't completely rule out murphy's static finger but it seems that the consumer drives are still a bit of a crapshoot.
Which reminds me, I really should run a backup.
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