Flash drives and portables hard drives are available on the market for many years by now but USB flash drives are way more used. Is Flash drives is the best choice for you? Maybe not,  portable hard drives have many advantages that users don’t know about. For the comparason, the Western Digital My Passport Essential 250 GB USB 2.0 WDME2500TN will be used because it is right in the middle of the price and the performance range of portable hard drives

Portable hard drives are as small as some phones!

With small dimensions of around of   0.6″h x 3.1″w x 5″l for  the Western Digital My Passport Essential 250 GB, it can easily fit inside a pocket . True, it is bigger then a flash drives but it is small enough for the performance it can give you back.

Bigger capacities

Portable hard drives are available is bigger format then USB keys, for instance a 32 GB flash drive is enourmous and cost more then

Cheaper Gigabyte per dollar ratio | Bigger capacities

The hard drive we are using in this comparison has 250GB and we can buy on amazon.com it at around 69$ US. If we do the calculation, you have a little more then 3.5GB per $ at this price, a 16 GB flash drive should cost you less the 5 dollar.

Also, portable hard drives are available different size like 80Gb, 120Gb, 160Gb,320Gb and 500Gb(wow).

True not everybody need so much Gigabytes but when you have it you surprisingly find new way to full it(OS, pictures, videos, games, work).

Work with usb 2.0

Before, portable hard drive needed to plug their hard drives in the wall for it to work. Now the power cord is no longer necessary, it’s taking the energy from the USB 2.0  plug of your computer so it’s perfect with your laptop everywhere.

Faster read and write then most USB keys

Yes !  For this comparison to mean something, i choose one of the fastest USB flash drive I knew about the Patriot Xporter XT Boost 32GB High speed USB (74$US). This flash drive claim it can go as fast as 200x, knowing that one x = 150Kb/s and that a Mb/b = 1000Kb/s, we can convert this value as 30Mb/s. But when we look at the speed of the WD hard drive we see that its transfer rate is of 60Mb/s, 2 times the speed a fast USB key goes.

Conclusion

I’ve been using the WD portable hard drives for 3 years now and I must say it saved me quite a lots of time. When i needed to transport big amount of data,  It was faster then burning a dvd. When i needed to do a backup  it could contain the whole backup ! Also it’s detected by windows without installing anything. By my opinion it’s the best choice someone can do.

The only reason you could prefer a USB flash drive is because you don’t need  more then 4 GB, you need something very tiny  or because you have less then a 20$ budget.

Your Choice?

Super computer of today in every house of the future?

There are relationships between the power of calculation and the number of transistors in a computer. There is also a pattern where the increase of the number of transistors in a computer depends upon the year it was made, this pattern is called “Moore’s law”, so by comparing the number of transistors in the #1 Top super computer of today [the Roadrunner] we will be able to find out how long it will take before we have such computers in our own home.

Most powerful super computer “Roadrunner”

The “Roadrunner” was bought in 2008 at the cost of 125 million dollars, it is the most powerful computer in the world according to top500.com, a website ranking the top super computers. The “Roadrunner” is used by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration. This super computer is made with a total of 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and of 6,480 AMD Opteron 2210. The 129600 core of this dream computer delivers a total of 1.71 petaflops . The IBM PowerXCell 8i contains 250 million transistors each and the AMD Opteron 2210 have around 243 million transistors. So in total, this monster of power has 481,46 billion transistors.

In how long ?

With this information, we can use Moore’s law , “ the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years”. If Moore’s theory continues to be true after 2020, knowing that the number of transistor in the new Intel i7 processor is 731 million, then we can calculate that we should all have a computer like the “Roadrunner” in our homes in approximately 18 to 19 years.

The future is just grandiose

At this time we can only dream of the tools that could be available to us with this kind of power. Will our every day pixelated video games end up looking more like 500 million dollars simulators? Wouldn’t it be superb to have such technology? No one can really predict what the future will look like, for instance, if you think back at what people in 1990 were saying about what would come after the millenium, you can see most of it was very grandiose.