Posted 10/08/08 at 09:56:45 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Just as we nerds have overhyped some technologies, we've also overlooked some even better alternatives. PC World has put on its thinking cap and posted its picks for the ten most overrated technology products and services - and alternatives that deserve a closer look.

So, How Would You Rate These Contenders?

• Ultra-portable laptops versus mini-laptops
• Microsoft Zune versus Apple iPod Touch
• Windows XP versus Windows Vista

To discover which ones get the overrated razz, and which ones deserve some unexpected love, join us after the break.

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Software, web 2.0, hardware, Operating Systems, consumer electronics, comparison, services

Posted 09/22/08 at 04:58:03 PM by Mark Edward Soper

While SSDs are getting plenty of attention from us (and everyone else) these days, it's way too early to shovel the dirt over the classic spinning-disk hard disk drive technology, eWeek suggests. You already know a couple of reasons: capacity and price per GB.

While 2.5-inch drives from Western Digital and Seagate broke the 500GB barrier last week, the biggest SSDs on the portable market are the 128GB Samsung drives and the forthcoming 160GB SSDs from Intel. SSDs don't come cheap, either: expect to pay $500-600 more for a laptop with an SSD onboard compared with a standard hard disk.

However, even if you can afford to give up some storage capaciy and a lot more cash, there are other reasons to think twice before turning your existing hard disk drive into a paperweight. At last week's DiskCon 2008 storage conference, experts cited by eWeek pointed out that NAND flash memory, the most common type of flash memory in use today, drops in performance with use, and that data retention is much shorter than with traditional disk drives.

So who's really excited about SSDs? Corporate data centers. In one case study described at DiskCon, a data center replaced hard disks with SSDs. The installation used one SSD for read, the other for write, and realized a 10x improvement in read/write speed and 5x less power consumption.

So, how do you feel about SSDs? Are you ready to pony up the extra dough and trade off some capacity to give SSDs a try today, or are you waiting until SSDs' price per GB, capacity and long-term behavior more closely mirror what hard disks provide today? See us after the jump for your chance to put in your feedback.

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storage, laptops, consumer electronics, ssd, solid-state drive, Desktops, hard disk, comparison