Intel is pushing a new form factor, the Next Unit of Computing (NUC), and it is looking good. I recently got two of these and have some pictures and experiences to share. The NUCs have some exciting properties and a couple of gotchas, read on and avoid my mistakes. First of all the box itself has a small surprise. When it opens it plays the Intel jingle from some embedded electronics with a light-sensor and a speaker. Oh, the humanity. ...
SSDs are great (except they can also be the worst of drives), but they usually have less capacity than modern conventional drives. In 2013, 128GB is still a common size, and even a 256GB drive can only hold so much. At the same time, main memory is increasing and 8GB of RAM is quite common. The increasing main memory will often reserve unnecessary space on your drive for hibernation and paging. This guide shows how to reclaim that space on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (but should work for any windows with minimal changes). ...
Solid state drives look surprisingly simple under the cover. If it wasn’t for the 2.5" form factor they inherited from ordinary drives, they could probably be both smaller and lighter than today. Shown here is a 160GB Intel SSD. The die cast aluminium casing is surprisingly thin and light. It is held together with four small screws, some of which are covered by do not void stickers. The 10 large chips comprises the actual storage, 16GB each. The two other chips are controllers for the storage and SATA interface. ...
There is no denying that solid state hard drives have a lot of advantages. They are fast, silent and runs cooler than ordinary drives. But when they fail, they fail hard. Really hard. The Intel 160GB SSD stock drive in my Lenovo T420s failed in May 2012, less than one year after the manufacturing date. And when I say failed, I mean it. The laptop suddenly responded slowly, then after a few seconds completely froze, gave a blue-screen and died. It would not reboot. ...