Playing with Flash Drives

I've been playing with USB Flash drives since late last week. Just about every manufacturer I can think of has sent me drives, and more are expected now that it's no longer Labor Day.

The idea of looking at USB Flash drive performance is something I had generally shied away from, simply because I felt that the buying decision should be made mostly based on price, physical size and storage size of the device. As more and more manufacturers got into the booming market, performance has really started to matter when considering various USB drives.

I'm waiting on a few more units before I can publish my findings, as I'd like to make the comparison as complete as possible. It shouldn't be much longer now.

The Google mini piece went live today, although the box itself has been operational for about two weeks prior to the article going up. The mini crawls and searches the site a lot better than our old system, and it's a lot less effort to get good results out of that box rather than worrying about creating a huge list of keywords for each document as well as depending on MS' full text search in SQL.

While Jason did the article, I was the brave soul taking apart the mini. The internals weren't too surprising, especially after I had already heard rumors of Gigabyte building lots of machines for Google (is it a G thing?). The machine was very well built, and at $3K I don't believe it is over priced given that you are mostly paying for the software; not to mention that faster hardware isn't really necessary from what I've seen. I was a bit surprised by the lengths Google went to keep the internals of the box a secret, but it does make sense from their standpoint.

I've also been on a bit of a mobile-kick lately, looking at laptops and coming up with some ideas for future articles. I've had a number of requests for a Dothan vs. Turion piece, given the topic of many recent articles around the web. I do think that the Turion is a decent contender, but so far I haven't been too impressed with the breadth of platforms that you can find Turions in. Without having done the testing myself (yet), it does look like that at the same price point, a Turion notebook may be a better bet than a similarly configured Dothan notebook. The Centrino advantage in the end boils down to the fact that you have more choice and, as a result, some better overall designs (and smaller form factors) than with AMD's offering. This won't be the last time I address the issue, but I just wanted to give you all a heads up that it is something I've thought about a lot lately.