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Read ArticleI’ve never been a fan of PC manufacturers pre-loading software onto computers that they sell, but it’s always been a way of life in an effort to cut costs and make the money up elsewhere. Not only does that crappy software take up space on your hard drive, most of the time, people never ever use any of it. It’s a waste of resources.
Well, today, I’m going to share with you a brand new way PC makers are wasting resources on computers. The offender? Lenovo. Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga 13 comes with a 128GB SSD, which sounds like a decent sized SSD, however, as Walt Mossberg revealed in his review, the computer only has 60GB of space to work with. How is that possible?
We have been erasing hard drives and other storage mediums for years now with much success by overwriting the data with zeros and ones several times. However, with the adoption of SSDs that may not be sufficient anymore. According to researches at the University of California at San Diego, “newer solid state disks have a much different internal architecture, so it is unclear whether what has worked on magnetic media will work on SSDs as well.”
The researchers study shows that after trying 14 sanitizing techniques on SSDs ranging from Gutman’s 35-pass method to the Schneier 7-pass method they found is that every data-erasing technique left at least 10MB of recoverable data from a 100MB file. In some techniques, such as overwriting the chip with pseudorandom data or using a British HMG IS5 baseline, left nearly all data intact.
I recently got my first solid state drive (SSD) as a gift from my girlfriend for our 5 year anniversary. I picked out the Mushkin Io 128GB SSD and boy is it fast. You truly don’t realize how much of a bottleneck your hard drive actually is until you have replaced it with a SSD. Specifications wise, the Mushkin Io 128GB SSD features read speeds of 250MB/s and write speeds of 180MB/s. The 128GB Io drive is built using NAND flash technology and uses the INDILINX “Barefoot” controller, which performs very nicely.
Mushkin’s Io SSD line of products comes in three different storage capacities: 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. The 128GB model is 2.5 inches which will fit in nicely into a notebook computer and even desktop systems (additional parts may be required for certain towers). For example, with my 2008 Mac Pro, I had to purchase a bracket to hold the SSD in place. I ended up purchasing one from TransIntl. The Mushkin Io 128GB also features a nice 512Mb cache buffer. According to the OverclockersClub benchmark tests, this drive came out on top in many aspects of each benchmark, beating out the Intel 80GB SSD ES and the Patriot Torqx (64GB and 128GB) SSD.
