Tech Time

Technology has drastically changed from the 1970’s until now in 2011. The world went from Commodore and Tandy computers with slower-than-smell processors to hyper thread possessors at literally lightning speed.
Older dreams are becoming reality. USB 3.0, solid state hard drives, hybrid drives and the phasing out of desktops and laptops to the compact, energy saving netbooks are now a reality.
Remember when the world changed from USB 1.0 to USB 2.0? Well get ready for the new and greatly improved USB 3.0!
USB 3.0 is backward compatible with USB 2.0; simply change to the new 3.0 cable. A benefit to USB 3.0 is that it is ten times faster than USB 2.0 and allows devices to go into low power modes as needed; it uses only on3-third the power of USB 2.0.
Maxing out transfer rates at 480Mbps, USB 2.0 is blasted out of the silicon with USB 3.0’s 5Gbps transfer rate.
The technology will be integrated into Intel devices this year while it has already been integrated into Asus motherboards.
According to Windows8News.com, USB 3.0 will be embedded into the new Windows 8 operating system arriving late 2011.
New solid state hard drives (SSD) have no moving parts unlike their archaic counterparts.
The most current form of SSD is the SSD hybrid drive which has a traditional drive and a SSD working in tandem.
Benchmarkreviews.com states that “Seagate's Momentus-XT hybrid uses a 7200-RPM hard drive fused with 4GB SLC NAND flash to deliver SSD speeds and HDD storage capacity.”
Further, SSDs improve speeds for applications and operating systems by 45,000%.
Other forms of SSDs are PCI-E only. One of which is the RAM-based DDR Drive which uses a combination of SSD and four DDR RAM sticks which can be found at PCPER.com which came out in 2009.
The RAR-based SSD may not be the latest in technology like the USB 3.0, but is a rare and quite stable device. “This flash memory enables the DDRdrive to backup and restore from non-volatile storage,” says Allyn Malventano, a components tester.
Going the way of the Zip Drive are desktop PCs and laptop computers. Introduced by Asus in 2007, netbooks, designed to be smaller, cheaper and lighter than conventional laptop computers, have become the standard for the avid computer user.
While these books lack optical disc drives, the batter life is extended, on some models, to seven hours and power consumption is minimal.
Some complaints about the netbooks are the smaller keyboard and touch pad. It may be an inconvenience, but the benefits seem to outweigh the shortcomings.