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Back in December I previewed OCZ’s Vertex 2 Pro, the first drive I’d tested to use SandForce’s SF-1500 controller. As you may remember, the controller works in a radical way – by reducing the amount of data written to flash it improves performance and longevity, at the cost of controller/firmware complexity. Not a bad tradeoff for a company trying to sell you expensive SSD controllers. If you want to know more about how it works, I’d suggest consulting my Vertex 2 Pro Preview. If you want to know how SSDs work, take a look at the SSD Relapse.

RIP…

The drive made an impressive showing, easily besting any other MLC SSD I’d ever tested. Unfortunately, it was pre-release hardware, with no known price and no set release date. Not to mention that the company who made the controller was shipping largely unproven technology with an unknown amount of reliability/validation testing.

Since then two things have happened.

First, my SandForce SF-1500 pre-release sample straight up died on me. No warning, no errors, just no data. It only took a couple of weeks worth of real world use to make it happen, but this is why I prefaced the preview with the following:

“Ultimately, the task of putting these drives to the test falls on the heads of you all – the early adopters. It’s only after we collectively put these drives through hundreds and thousands of hours of real world usage that we can determine whether or not they’re sponge-worthy.

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It’s finally ready: part 2 of our H55/H57 coverage. After battling it out with eight motherboards, we decide which ones we’d be happy to live with on a daily basis. If you missed part 1, we’ll take this opportunity to re-direct you.

The short recap is that we found a couple of good candidates in part 1, namely the ASRock H55M-Pro and the P7H55D-M Evo. The late January BIOS releases for both of these boards delivered good all round performance and functionality, with only a couple of things needing improvement or change. For ASUS, we felt their board was a touch too pricey at $134; ASUS have since dropped the MSRP of the H55 Evo $119. In a typical Newegg maneuver, the board retails at $124 with a shipping cost of $2.99, while boards from other vendors are shipped at MSRP + $7.87 with the same delivery deal—strange.

Meanwhile, ASRock managed to add a touch more overclocking headroom for 8GB memory configurations by adding support for Quick Path Interconnect multiplier changes, delivering a great all around performer at an asking price of $95. The other two boards from part one are the ASUS P7H57D-V Evo and the MSI H55M-ED55. ASUS’ H57 is simply too expensive at $200 in our opinion; we’d put $100 towards a discrete GPU rather than fork out the extra money for a full size ATX board offering SATA 6G at this stage (at least until SATA 6G peripherals are affordable). MSI’s H55M-ED55 hasn’t received a new BIOS since our last test (nor can we find it on sale in the States), and remains a little finicky to set up in comparison to boards from ASUS and Gigabyte.

Part two’s line-up consists of two very attractively priced boards from Gigabyte, the H55-USB3 and H57M-USB3 models coming in at ($110 and $119), together with ECS’s super cheap stock runner called the H55H-V1.0 ($80). Finally, we just about managed to squeeze BIOSTAR’s TH55XE ($115) into the fray after it arrived late in our labs this week. All of these boards have a head-start of sorts over the boards we tested in part 1, as they had an extra four weeks for vendors to get to grips with the H55/H57 chipsets and tackle some of the common issues that plague chipset launches. And it’s the subject of issues that leads us nicely into our summary section before we delve deeper into the workings of each board.

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A USB flash drive larger than your console’s hard disk drive.

Living in the U.S. and in search for a USB flash drive with massive capacity? Kingston is finally shipping its 256GB drive to the United States with data transfer rates of 25MB/sec. read and 12MB/sec. write.

The model known as the DataTraveler 310 replaces the 256GB DataTraveler 300, released in July 2009 to the Asia/Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa regions.

“We saw an opportunity to push the capacity envelope for USB Flash drives in the marketplace. Customer feedback and our research determined that this is a great solution for designers, engineers and architects who have a need to easily store and transport large data files,” said Andrew Ewing, USB business manager, Kingston. “For the enthusiast who wants easy access to their full media library, the DataTraveler 310 can store up to 365 CDs, 54 DVDs or 51,000 images. This device makes an entire collection of data easily portable.”

For those thinking of packing this massive drive with sensitive information, the DataTraveler 310 features Password Traveler software, which allows the user to create and access a password-protected privacy zone. The secure area of the drive can account for up to 90 percent of the drive’s capacity and does not require administrator rights.

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IDF kicks off today and while Intel is was busy getting ready for the party, AMD has stepped in and snatched just a smidgen of the limelight by announcing that it is readying a hexa-core processor aimed at consumer desktops.

The chip, codenamed Thubon, is set for release sometime next year and according to Maximum PC, it will be backwards compatible with existing AM3 and AM2+ motherboards. Maximum PC cites AMD officials who Monday said that the heavily rumored Thurbon was "a done deal."

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