Acreo Aeneas

Took a gamble and got a refurbished 30 GB OCZ Vertex 1 off of NewEgg for the low, low price of $30. Had some trouble getting the drive to be recognized by Windows or by my BIOS. Had to use a jumper to put the drive into firmware flash mode (destructive to any data stored). Plugged her in using a external enclosure and Windows 8 picked her up for a few minutes. Unplugged it and removed the jumper and installed it into my ASUS 1000HE netbook. Ended up installing Ubuntu 13.04 (32-bit) on there. ...

Just bought a Plextor M5S and will be throwing it into my development rig later today (since it's 4 am on Sunday). I'll take a read performance hit (huge one) since my dev rig only has a P5Q with SATA 3/Gb ports (just like my Samsung 840 took a read hit in my laptop). I should still manage to pull a 25 second or so boot time out of it using Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

I decided to pick a different brand and a different controller SSD. That means I have: Kingston (Sandforce), ...

So I spent a portion of my tax return on...MOAR SSDs! That's right, I think I'm done buying HDDs for the most part. I still will for the sheer storage, but any critical data I need will start migrating over to a SSD once I can afford to replace my files hard drives (later). Right now, boot drives and extra applications drives is my focus.

I was going to plop down $300 on the Western Digital 4 TB Black. Not bad considering it surpasses the first-gen SSDs in a few areas (nothing ...

Great, my new build is nearly a week old and to celebrate one of my Western Digital Green drives (1.5 TB) that I use as storage for media and important files is dying. I can't even copy most of the files on the drive over to my SSD to save the data. Jeez, and looking at new drives now is extremely depressing. What I would have paid $60 for a 1.5 TB pre-flood now costs more, around $70 to $90. To make it worse, they've now dropped warranties on most of these drives to 1 year. One year! WTF?! ...

So after my last major upgrade (and my only upgrade) to my current Core 2 machine, I've decided it's finally time to move on. Not to AMD (for numerous and far too detailed reasons) but to a current Sandy Bridge E platform. Roughly compared to a Core 2 Quad Q9650 (even though my Q9550 is overclocked at 3.6 Ghz), the i7-2700k should give me a good 40% boost in some apps (mostly MT and dependent on CPU) and enough of a boost in games and general productivity to hopefully last me the next 4 years. ...