The State of Solid State Hard Drives

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror has put up a post on his experience with his latest SSD.

Intel was the only game in town for about a year, but fortunately for us consumers, the competition finally caught up. The new Indilinx controller models, such as this Crucial 128 GB SSD, are just as fast as the X25-M. And, best of all, they're cheaper, while also offering a not-insubstantial bump to 128 GB of storage!

I picked this model up for $325 plus tax and shipping. And, frankly, I was blown away by the performance difference compared to the 300 GB Velociraptor I had in my system before. That drive is not exactly chopped liver; it's incredibly fast by magnetic platter drive standards. But it's beyond slow next to the latest SSDs.

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The Model MHDD - Manual Hard Drive Destroyer

When you need to make sure your data is truly destroyed, use one of these.

Government specifications require that in an emergency situation a hard drive needs to be destroyed so that a person or persons can not spin the drive. This must be done quickly and reliably. The MHDD meets this requirement. It takes less than 15 seconds to destroy each hard drive. All one needs to do is to insert the proper drive height adaptor (if applicable) into the slot and crank the handle 8 rotations. The internal workings of the unit press down on the drive, bending it approximately 90 degrees. The MHDD then pushes the destroyed hard drive out for easy disposal.

• Link (via UNEASYsilence)