Solid State Hits the Desktop

As we approach the tail end of 2008, resellers will have tremendous opportunity to capitalize on massive changes in several of Intel's product families. Perhaps the highest-profile shift will happen in desktop processing, where the current "Penryn" family will give way to the "Nehalem" architecture---maybe the most significant change seen since the original Pentium Pro's debut.

One side effect of Nehalem's advances is that I/O will become an even larger performance bottleneck than it already is, according to benchmarks shown at Intel's recent Developer Forum in San Francisco. Expect the answer to be a concerted shift away from magnetic storage and toward solid state hard drives. Not surprisingly, Intel now has a mainstream offering in that space called the X25-M, weighing in at 80GB and armed with a native 3Gbps SATA interface.

Performance is unquestionably the X25-M's strong suit. It's able to sustain sequential reads of up to 250MBps and sequential writes of up to 70MBps. The drive's read latency is a scant 85 microseconds. And it only consumes 150mW in a typical active state. Additionally, the drive is remarkably robust, withstanding operating shocks of up to 1,000G with a 1.2 million hour MTBF. Intel says the secret to its unprecedented performance is the X25-M's memory controller and firmware---which employ a 10-channel architecture.

Government-Grade Security

On a seemingly regular basis we hear about this business losing a laptop with sensitive customer data or that government entity misplacing a flash drive with important intelligence on it. Those stories go public specifically because the data wasn't encrypted and, thus, compromised. Of course, nobody thinks something like that will ever happen to them. But that doesn't change the fact that you should be selling your SMB customers on the virtues of encrypted storage ---especially when it comes to a portable drive that they're taking on the road.

Maxtor's 320GB BlackArmor drive sports hardware-based, full disk encryption that doesn't need to be toggled on or off. The protection is always enabled, and nobody can access the drive without a password. When asked about the status of data if the password were to be forgotten, Maxtor representatives almost-humorously replied that the information would be lost. According to Maxtor, not even a professional data recovery service can pull encrypted data from the BlackArmor. And if you delete the encryption key, the entire drive can be securely disposed of.

Although it's incredibly secure, Maxtor's BlackArmor is still easy to use. The drive pulls enough power over the USB interface to run on its own, without an external adapter. A five-year warranty on the hardware makes support a piece of cake, and the sub-$200 price tag pulls industrial-strength data protection within easy reach of SMBs.

3D Performance Fit for a King

NVIDIA has claimed the high performance enthusiast market as its home turf for quite a while, and if independent reviews can be taken as gospel, the new GTX 280 processor is today's fastest GPU. This is based on NVIDIA's GT200 core, a 65nm design featuring 1.4 billion transistors. That's roughly twice the 754 million found in the preceding 9800 and 8800 parts, and it explains why PNY's GTX 280 card is sheathed in a full-body heatsink-fan shroud.

Of course, all that circuitry gets put to some amazing use. PNY's GTX 280 features 240 unified shader cores, each clocked at 602MHz with a shader clock of 1296MHz. If you'd like more big numbers, the GTX 280 boasts a processing speed of 933 gigaflops and a texture fill rate of 48.2 billion per second. This is facilitated through 1GB of DDR3 sitting on a 512-bit memory interface, delivering a total memory bandwidth of 141.7GBps.

But that's all spec sheet stuff. All most users will want to know is that the card dances all over most competing models in the market. The feature-oriented crowd will want to know that the card supports DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.1, plus NVIDIA bakes in the PhysX (physics) engine it purchased from AEGIA. Many adapters only support HDCP decryption (required for Blu-ray and HD DVD playback) on one port, but the GTX 280 is dual-link HDCP capable, and the GPU builds in NVIDIA's PureVideo HD technologies. These not only provide hardware acceleration for HD decoding but also work to improve visual quality through techniques like de-interlacing and noise reduction.

With that big heatsink, some users may wonder about power consumption. True enough, the GTX 280 chugs down more than 200W under load, which is why you see those dual power connectors (one 6-pin, one 8-pin) built into the top of the card. But by using technologies like clock gating, low power states, and the kinds of dynamic frequency adjusting we're used to seeing in today's CPUs, the GTX 280 can idle along at just 25W---a huge improvement over the 60W in NVIDIA's prior generation.

PNY's dual-slot GTX 280 card is triple SLI-capable. The company adds more value with extras like an HD breakout box, internal HDMI audio cable, and a pair of DVI-to-VGA and -HMDI adapters. At $499 list, this is no small investment, but there are plenty of enthusiasts out there who demand top performance and see the value in what PNY and NVIDIA bring to the table. Serve it up with style.

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