
One word:
WANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANT
WANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANT
WANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANTWANT
Thank you, im done now
(Just get my coat)
Samsung has been making hard drives for years, but it's taken a wee bit longer for it to decide that if Western Digital, Seagate and co. can extend their drive production efforts to nice, shiny external storage units for consumers, it can too. Samsung Story Samsung's Story: strong and (almost) silent What Samsung has …
But a _mini_ USB socket on a full size drive?!
Within easy reach of me at the moment I have something like 10^23 full size USB A-B cables, they are truly ubiquitous. When I cart external hard drives between home and work etc I don't usually bother bringing the lead, I leave it plugged into my home machine, it's one less thing to carry.
Whilst I have several mini ones they would take much longer to locate, because they're not used for as many things. And there's two types that look nearly the same but are incompatible.
Fine for devices that _need_ a physically smaller socket, a full size external HDD however does not.
When typical SATA internal drives were 50-60 Mbytes/sec read speed, attaching them externally via USB wasn't too much of a penalty. Nowadays though, internal SATA drives (including Samsung's drives) regularly exceed 100 Mbytes/sec - my Samsung F1 1TB internal does 116 Mbytes/sec read for example. USB 2.0 has a maximum throughput of 60 Mbyte/sec "in theory", but I can only get around 32 Mbytes/sec on my external 500GB Samsung USB drive in practice.
All of this means that recent external USB SATA drives are horribly crippled performance wise - eSATA is one possible solution (but not many PCs come with that), but I think we're in "limbo" at the moment until PCs and external drives support USB 3.0. Personally, I've taken the decision to buy no more external USB hard drives until 3.0 is established (so that's at least a year and probably a new PC too...).
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Why did they ruin the otherwise rather pleasing frontal aspect (god, I'm sounding like an estate agent here...) of the drive with a hideous protruberance such as that power knob? It's not as if the average user is likely to need to switch it on/off so often that being around the front rather than the back is going to be a real benefit, and I can't imagine anyone wanting to adjust the activity light brightness more than once or twice. Putting it on the front rather than the back also means that you can't take advantage of the space behind the drive required for cable routing, and so the whole thing ends up being deeper than it needs to be.
And easily-accessible power switches aren't at all compatible with toddlers - if I had one of these drives sat next to the mediacentre PC, I'd give it a day at most until our 21 month old learned how to switch it on and off... In comparison, the FreeAgent drive already connected to the mediacentre has remained powered up without a break despite it also having a bright flashing white light on the front to attract his attention - the power switch on that is round the back where he can't see it, and so as far as he's concerned it doesn't exist.
Oh, and Sam, any chance you could send some of those full-size USB cables in my direction? I'm in the opposite scenario here - over-run with mini-USB cables and always struggling to find a spare full-sized one on the rare occasions I need an extra.
The many tentacled cable tree. It's a feature of many a geek room. Of course, you can never find the one you want, can you? Ever tried looking for a null modem cable or an APC dumb cable that doesn't kill the UPS as soon as DTR goes high making the whole thing as pointless as a muslin condom? You know you had one on that pile but, even though it was like dog turds underfoot and you wished the sodding thing would piss off last week, finding it now is an exercise in futility ;o)
Whilst on the subject, why is it that when I need an IEC lead with a BS1363 on the end of it all I can find is IEC M->F, yet when when I want a M->F...
Hmm, I like the idea of a knob on an external drive, but having a continuously variable LED is not the most productive use. How about having it control the accoustic/performance managment? That would be a differentiation that an actual hard drive manufacturer could make with an external drive (as opposed to a commodity peripherals manufacturer).
Obviously your geek fu is not strong...
When I started this job 7 months ago, I spent pretty much my first solid week refusing to do anything but coil cables, cable tie them and file them in stack & store boxes depending on category.
It does mean that IEC M-F would be in the same box as 13A plug IEC, but they are the only two sorts of cables in that box. Similarly the mini USB are in the same box as maxi USB (although I'm considering revising that).
A cable _pile_, though? Nah, I'm too much of a nerd (read: my OCD is too bad) for anything that messy :D
Far too organised. If I made finding a cable less of a challenge, every Tom, Dick and J Random Luser would be making off with all my "kettle leads." That's my excuse.
To be fair, mine is a suspended pile; there's so many of the things, anything other than "pile" or "heap" (but never "stack" as that sounds like you could just push a cable on or pop a cable off with a simple operation when, in reality, a big job breaks out) is doing the resultant mutant squid an injustice. It contains anything from old 100R twinax cables (that, thank Eris, I will never have to make up again) to eSATA multiports. Speaking of which, I really ought to check that rope that suspends them all...
*THUD* <muffled swearing/>
OK, *now* it's a pile ;o)
I just got one from Ebuyer. Very nice it is too. Even nicer with an EXT3 filesystem on it. :)
Oddly the power cable is a European style one, with just two round prongs on it. So that won't fit in a UK power socket. I just went back to Ebuyer to check what I'd bought, and it's been discontinued. That didn't last long, did it? Maybe they bought a batch destined for Europe?
The other end of the cable is a two hole 8-shaped connector, and being a fully badged up geek I had such a cable with a UK plug on it. So no big deal for me.
Samsung has started production of chips using its 3nm fabrication process, beating rival TSMC, which expects to begin making chips with its N3 node generation later this year.
The resultant chips are claimed to reduce power consumption by up to 45 percent and improve performance by up to 23 percent, with further gains promised in a second generation of the process.
Korea's electronics giant said it has started initial production with its 3nm process node, which introduces what the firm calls Multi-Bridge-Channel FET (MBCFET) technology. This is Samsung's version of the Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor architecture, where the gate material wraps around the conducting channel.
Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission has fined Samsung Electronics AU$14 million ($9.6 million) for making for misleading water resistance claims about 3.1 million smartphones.
The Commission (ACCC) says that between 2016 and 2018 Samsung advertised its Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, A5, A7, S8, S8 Plus and Note 8 smartphones as capable of surviving short submersions in the sea or fresh water.
As it happens The Register attended the Australian launch of the Note 8 and watched on in wonder as it survived a brief dunking and bubbles appeared to emerge from within the device. Your correspondent recalls Samsung claiming that the waterproofing reflected the aim of designing a phone that could handle Australia's outdoors lifestyle.
In yet another sign of how fortunes have changed in the semiconductor industry, Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC is expected to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue for the first time.
Wall Street analysts estimate TSMC will grow second-quarter revenue 43 percent quarter-over-quarter to $18.1 billion. Intel, on the other hand, is expected to see sales decline 2 percent sequentially to $17.98 billion in the same period, according to estimates collected by Yahoo Finance.
The potential for TSMC to surpass Intel in quarterly revenue is indicative of how demand has grown for contract chip manufacturing, fueled by companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple who design their own chips and outsource manufacturing to foundries like TSMC.
The demand for consumer electronics has slowed down in the face of inflation – but that didn't stop nine of the world's 10 largest contract chip manufacturers from growing in the first three months of the year.
That's according to Taiwanese research firm TrendForce, which said on Monday the collective revenues for the top 10 chip foundries grew 8.2 percent to $31.96 billion in the first quarter of 2022 from the previous quarter. That's a hair slower than the 8.3 percent quarterly growth reported for the top-ten foundries in the fourth quarter of last year.
On a broader level, TrendForce said this revenue growth came from a mix of "robust wafer production" and foundries continuing to raise the prices of wafers as a result of high demand.
Samsung has once again been accused of cheating in benchmark tests to inflate the apparent abilities of its hardware.
The South Korean titan was said to have unfairly goosed Galaxy Note 3 phone benchmarks in 2013, and faced with similar allegations about the Galaxy S4 in 2018 settled that matter for $13.4 million.
This time Samsung has allegedly fudged the results for its televisions, specifically the S95B QD-OLED and QN95B Neo OLED LCD TVs.
Samsung vice chairman Lee Jae-yong is said to be courting Dutch chipmaker NXP on a visit to Europe to bolster the company's position in the automotive semiconductor market.
According to the Asian Tech Press, Jae-yong, who has been released on probation after serving time on corruption charges, is expected to visit several chipmakers and semiconductor manufacturing vendors including the Netherland's NXP and ASML, as well as Germany's Infineon. Press became aware of Jae-yong's plans after a Seoul Central District Court approved the vice chairman's travel plans.
NXP offers a wide array of microprocessors, power management, and wireless chips for automotive, communications, and industrial applications. However, the Asian Tech Press said Samsung's interest in the company, which is valued at approximately $56 billion, is primarily rooted in the company's automotive silicon.
Microsoft and Samsung have teamed to stream Xbox games on the Korean giant's smart televisions and monitors.
Samsung has offered streaming games since early 2022, taking advantage of its smart displays running the Linux-based Tizen OS. The "gaming hub" installed on those devices can already deliver games from Google Stadia and Nvidia GeForce Now.
Xbox is a rather larger brand, making this deal considerably more significant.
The global economy may be in a tenuous situation right now, but the semiconductor industry is likely to walk away from 2022 with a "healthy" boost in revenues, according to analysts at IDC. But beware oversupply, the analyst firm warns.
Semiconductor companies across the world are expected to grow collective revenues by 13.7 percent year-on-year to $661 billion, IDC said in research published Wednesday. Global semiconductor revenue last year was $582 billion.
"Overall, the semiconductor industry remains on track to deliver another healthy year of growth as the super cycle that began in 2020 continues this year," said Mario Morales, IDC group vice president of semiconductors.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Samsung Electronics boss Lee Jae-yong met on Monday in South Korea and “discussed how to cooperate between the two companies."
That quote comes from Samsung, which also let the world know the two leaders talked about next-generation memory chips, silicon for PCs and mobile devices, fabless chip design, the foundry business, and more.
It is unclear if the talks addressed a particular issue, or just represented the heads of the world’s top two chipmakers getting together for a chat while Gelsinger was in town.
Samsung and Red Hat have pledged to work together on developing software to get the best from emerging memory technologies.
The Korean giant points out that a bunch of storage and memory tech – NVMe SSDs, Compute Express Link, the combination of high-bandwidth memory and processing-in-memory, and data fabrics – all need enabling software if they are to work well with the kind of demanding applications they're promised to, well, enable.
The tech is likely to be used in different tiers, while sharing memory across devices is well and truly on the agenda as part of a renewed push for composable infrastructure.
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