Specifications

NOVEMBER 6, 2007 PC MAGAZINE 19
BEST
of the Internet
DEEZER
www.deezer.com
Formerly known as
Blogmusik, Deezer is the
hot new music site of
the moment. No fees, no
registration—not even
a free username and
password—and instant,
one-click access.—Mark
Hachman
ACCUWEATHER
.COM ASTRONOMY
CENTER
www.accuweather
.com/astronomy
Accuweather’s new
Astronomy Center
includes data on
space weather,
astronomy news,
nightly viewing con-
ditions for different
celestial objects, and
more.—Alan Henry
WOWIO
www.wowio.com
WOWIO is an e-book
site that offers all of its
books for free in PDF
format, so they’re easy
to download, easy to
read, and very portable.
—AH
Are hard disk drives destined to go the way of
floppy drives? If the nascent trend in laptops is
any indication, solid-state drives (SSDs) may
eventually supplant hard drives.
SSDs are made of nonvolatile fl ash memory—
rather than the spinning disks and read/write
heads of hard drives—and are prized for their
lower power consumption, reduced heat buildup,
and dead-quiet operation. They are also imper-
vious to shakes, shocks, and drops, which is why
Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Toshiba have
brought notebooks with SSDs to market.
SanDisk, one of the top SSD makers, says the
flash memory drives can also improve system
performance with data transfer rates of 67MB per
second or more. SSDs can also stretch battery life,
requiring just 0.9 watt of power, versus 1.9 watts
for a hard drive.
The catch, however, is the price tag. SSDs cost
from $11 to $19 per gigabyte, whereas hard drives
cost a mere 32 cents per gigabyte. And though
several companies have announced 128GB SSDs,
most offerings top out at 64GB. “Businesses need
to look at total cost of ownership of SSD versus
HDD,” says Jim Elliott, director of fl ash marketing
at Samsung. “If you’re managing a fl eet of laptops,
SSDs can reduce failure rates, downtime, and lost
productivity.”
FUTURE WATCH
Computing Sees the Light
Imagine a CPU clocked at a few hundred terahertz. A pro-
gram that typically needs a full day to run would take a frac-
tion of a second. Photonics, or the study of light and other
radiant energy, could make it possible. A U.K. research team
led by Fetah Benabid at the University of Bath is working
toward this goal with the help of a special optical fi ber
called “hollow-core photonic crystal fi ber,” which allows
spectrally coherent light (or light that is aligned spectrally)
to pass through. The research may unlock the power to syn-
thesize and control the shape of photon waves. Combine this with the separate explorations into quantum
memory and the photonic computer may become a reality. Does this mean the death of electronics? Not
quite; people are the limiting factor. “We have to slow things down for human use,” Benabid says. “Photon-
ics will always include some kind of electronics, at least as an interface.”—Anton Galang
 e Solid State
of Storage
 e likely successor to the hard
drive is solid state. But there’s still
a price barrier.
SSD prices will keep them out of the hands of
most consumers. Laptops with SSDs cost $500 to
$700 more than ones outfi tted with three times the
amount of hard disk storage. Analysts at Gartner
predict that prices will fall and capacities will rise
so that by 2010, about 20 percent of notebooks will
ship with SSDs.—John R. Quain
For more cool Web sites
and handy utilities and
apps, visit PC Magazine’s
blog AppScout (www
.appscout.com).
Dell’s ATC series
with SSD storage
SanDisk’s fl ash-based
solid state drive
THE CORE OF PHOTONICS This diagram
shows a hollow-core photonics structure.