Though I’m willing to bet the Maximum PC core demographic differs somewhat from that of the Oprah Winfrey show, oddly she has done something worth mentioning. The TV celebrity took the opportunity on Friday to do some heavy plugging of the Amazon Kindle.  Oprah claims the gifted Kindle she received this summer “has changed her life”. Some might down play the significance of this endorsement, but the popularity of Oprah’s book club is often enough to catapult relatively obscure titles all the way to the New York Times Bestseller list seemingly overnight.  Heck, new studies have shown even a simple nod from the celebrity will be enough to net Barack Obama an additional one million votes. Winfrey who was joined by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos described the gadget as “pricy” but “environmentally friendly”.  The endorsement does come with a fringe benefit however. A $50 price break is offered when using the promotional code OPRAHWINFREY during checkout. So if you’ve been waiting for a price drop before you pick up a Kindle this brings the device down to a modest $309.00 USD until November 1st 2008.

So while I’m willing to bet Oprah isn’t the primary reason our readers will pick up a Kindle, has anyone else made the switch from paperbacks? Let us know what you think of the Kindle.

RAID  5 users anxiously awaiting the debut of 2 TB drives to help build massive storage array’s may want to think twice before taking the plunge. An in-depth look into the underlying problems with massive storage RAID5 configurations suggests that s a single drive as redundancy might not cut it anymore. SATA drives carry a specified unrecoverable read rate of 10^14. This might sound like a huge number, but it basically tells us that any array in excess of 11.37 TB will contain at least one unrecoverable read. In the case of a RAID 5 rebuild, this can be catastrophic.

Hit the jump to learn why RAID 6 won't help you, and to see what the future holds.