Flash memory on a USB stick is easy enough to understand concerning the way it works. The memory is a type of EEPROM and non-volatile, which is the reason it doesn’t require a battery or external power source to retain the information stored on it.

But if you ever asked the question, "Is there a difference between brands?", the answer is yes and no.

Concerning data reliability, all USB sticks are roughly the same. It is very rare that one would absolutely fail on you unless put it through several hundred thousand erase cycles. Some can even go up to a million.

Concerning construction, yes there are differences. Some sticks have a poor casing, causing them to fall apart prematurely. It doesn’t happen often but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Concerning data transfer rate, this is where the biggest differences lie. Some sticks are legitimately slow.

Sandisk (which everybody has owned at one point or another, I have 3 of them,) routinely has the slowest transfer speeds. Reliable, yes, but slow.

Patriot on the other hand routinely has the highest transfer rate. In particular, the Patriot Xporter series. You will pay more for these, but you will also get faster transfers, both for average and burst rate. The customer ratings speak for themselves on Patriot flash memory products.

(And if you happen to have $300+ that you want to spend, Patriot has a Magnum stick that boasts super-high speeds and has 128GB of storage. Yes, 128GB. That’s not a typo.)

Do transfer rates matter?

This all depends on how you use your USB stick.

If using the stick for:

• Bootable biz-card sized Linux
• Routinely transferring files over 25MB in size
• Routinely transferring large amounts of data

..then you will legitimately need a fast-transfer USB stick.

If using the stick for:

• Photos
• Documents
• MP3s
• Smaller files

..then a faster stick won’t really matter unless you’re transferring many small files equaling a large amount of data.

What’s your favorite (or least favorite) brand of Flash memory?

Sandisk, A-Data, Corsair, Advent, Lexar, etc.? Which do you use? Does it live up to expectation or "act weird" periodically?

Some people may be under the impression that if a web site loads slowly and/or causes your browser to crash that it might be your computer’s fault it happened.

Not necessarily.

There are several things that people interpret as a fault with their computer when in fact it isn’t.

Things that are not your fault when problems happen loading web sites

Web site server issues

PCMech even suffers from this periodically (it is a largely visited site). It happened yesterday. When sites go slow due to server issues, that has nothing to do with your internet connection whatsoever.

The best way to find out if a site is having problems is to perform a Twitter search. This does not require a Twitter account at all. For example, if your were having a problem with Gmail, search Twitter for that term. If you see a bunch of other people having similar issues, then you know it’s not your fault.

And yes, Twitter itself has another site that checks this.

Flash

Many people hate Flash with a passion. Flash will crash any browser. It will even crash your OS at times. Most of us use Flash when we view video content on the internet. Even if you have a brand new multi-thousand dollar Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM in it, Flash will at times cause OS X to have a kernel panic, forcing a restart of the OS. Not even a BSD-based UNIX is immune to this (and you can’t get any more stable than UNIX).

Flash has never had an in-program way of disabling it. Either it’s installed and on-demand whenever a request from a web site is made, or you have it uninstalled completely as there is no "off" option. Fortunately there are add-ons like Flashblock for Firefox that can temporarily disable Flash. This allows the option of having it enabled only when you want it to be. It’s sad that an add-on like that needs to exist when there should be an in-program way of doing it, but it’s better than nothing.

Slashdotting/Digg Effect

If a particular article on a web site triggers a massive response from the internet as a whole, an onslaught of requests hit the web server and will at times temporarily take it offline due to the sheer amount of incoming traffic. The original phrase for this effect was called Slashdotting, but it is also known as Digg effect. Either means the same thing in general conversation.

When this happens, the site you’re trying to get to will either load very slowly or not at all until the traffic goes back down to normal levels.

OS/Browser limitations

Certain web sites will make too many network requests. This in combination with an OS limitation either by bug or design will render your internet connectivity unusable for a minute or two.

The best example of this is Google Maps using the Windows operating system. That web site uses many different servers in order to display map data in your browser. If you zoom very quickly around the map, this makes so many network requests that Windows will literally lock any further requests and make it appear that your internet connection isn’t working. This is incorrect. It is working, but Windows is specifically designed to limit network requests for security purposes. The solution is to close the browser, wait 60 to 90 seconds, and your internet connection will start working again.

To date, I have only been able to replicate this rare instance using the Google Maps web site. And yes, it still happens.

Is this a fault of Windows? No. It’s a fault of Google Maps. Other mapping web sites never have this issue. Only on Google Maps (and not Google Earth) does this occur.

The browser itself is also purposely designed to only accept a limited amount of network (as in http) requests at any given time.

In Internet Explorer 8, the maximum concurrent connections to a single host allowed is 6. This is an improvement over previous editions of IE where the setting is 4. This is yet another reason to use the most current version of IE, should you use that browser.

In Firefox 3.5.3 (the latest version at the time of this writing), the maximum concurrent connections to a single host is also 6. However it should be noted that the maximum total http connections in Firefox is 30, with a per-server of 15. The 6 applies to the persistent connections per server (which is what matters the most).

You can see these settings by typing about:config and searching for the term connection, like this:

I strongly recommend against modifying these settings. Increasing the maximum connections or other "max" values for other connection settings ordinarily will not increase your transfer speeds at all.

Webmaster error

This mainly happens on personal web sites. If a the owner of a web site is using WordPress for example, and installs a WP plugin that doesn’t exactly work correctly which causes "weird" things to happen to the site, this is obviously not your fault.

"Showpiece" web sites

These are web sites that are so full of Flash (of course) that there’s actually a pretty good chance it will crash your browser unless you have a fairly fast computer.

A classic example of this is the Transformers Movie web site.

This web site is absolutely horrible. It will bring your web browser to its knees. When you click "Enter Site" it will purposely force full screen. Horrible, horrible, horrible. You will hate this web site in very short order. The only thing that will save your browser from crashing is if it’s the current version of IE or Firefox (both have well-written code to accommodate for super-bloat sites with craptastic Flash).

Web sites like these are showpieces and nothing more. They serve no purpose other than to be glitzy and have plenty of "wow" factor. Said another way, useless.

If the site hoses your browser, I sincerely apologize in advance.

Flash is one of those things on the internet that’s been a source of irritation ever since it first appeared. From the perspective of a programmer, it’s bulky and difficult to "mold" into what you want it to do. From the perspective of the user, it’s "That thing that makes me wait to load just to view it, and when it does can potentially crash my browser."

Speaking of crashing, Flash does not play favorites on which operating system it likes to crash browsers on. From time to time, something will go wrong with the plug-in and completely lock up the browser, forcing a restart of the program. Not even Linux is safe from this.

If you’re saying, "I can load any Flash page just fine", try it with multiple tabs. Chances are it’s the only type of content that will make your browser slow down and even potentially choke, even with the most powerful computer. Does that mean your computer sucks? Not in the slightest. It’s just Flash.

Flash is so absolutely hated by some that there are specific browser add-ons to block it. This is because there is no manual way (nor has there ever been) to turn Flash off without uninstalling it. I’m not kidding.

Unfortunately we are forced to use Flash for video on the internet, both for viewing and broadcasting. Every video sharing web site is chock full of it. Every broadcasting site like Stickam, BlogTV, Ustream, Livestream (formerly Mogulus) and so on are also full of Flash.

When I produce videos for PCMech, I don’t use Flash because I want to. It’s because I have to. Personally I would love to switch over to WMV or MOV format as both are far superior to Flash-based FLV. But the problem is that one is Windows specific and the other for the Mac. Mac people hate Windows Media Player. Windows people hate QuickTime. FLV is the only one that can play no matter what OS you’re using because everybody has the Flash plugin installed.

When Dave (owner of PCMech) produces videos, he also has constant arguments with the Flash video format because it’s literally a crapshoot on whether or not the encoding will work correctly. Bear in mind Dave uses Macs. I use Windows. And we both curse Flash almost every time either of us use it.

Ironically, Flash is now having the exact same problem it did years ago, but this time on smartphone devices.

The original problem was that many computers weren’t powerful enough to run the Flash plugin. Now they are, but only because our processors and memory are well along enough to handle Flash’s bloat.. even though it still locks up browsers from time to time.

Smartphone browsers on the other hand simply aren’t powerful enough to handle "full" Flash. Yes, it can handle a watered-down version, but it’s a repeat of the same problem that happened in Web 1.0 days.

Is Flash the worst thing on the internet? Yes. Slow to program, slow to load, crash-happy, incompatible with many mobile browsers.. the list goes on and on.

Since we’re all forced to use Flash to view "rich content" on the internet, how long is it going to take for Adobe to release a version that isn’t so unbelievably crappy?

My guess is not any time soon.

What’s your opinion?

Do you think Flash is the worst thing on the internet?

For those wondering, I am running the 32-bit edition of Windows 7. I did this primarily for application compatibility above all else.

The first response from those who are familiar with 64-bit environments are quick to say, "But you can run 32-bit apps in a 64-bit environment easily."

That’s not always the case.

Running certain 32-bit apps in 64-bit environments can present itself to be a problem no matter what OS you use. For example, many Mac people use Photoshop. All new Macs are 64-bit. But Adobe does not have a 64-bit edition for the Mac. Photoshop still runs fine but doesn’t take full advantage of the 64-bit environment. It also ticked off Mac users something fierce that Photoshop 64-bit will be for Windows first. And if I were a Mac user that would perturb me quite a bit as well.

Per conversations I’ve had with a few folks running Windows Vista or 7 64-bit, two particular types of platforms have exhibited some quirks, also both from Adobe.

The first one is Adobe AIR. It would appear AIR doesn’t "play nice" in 64-bit world except for Linux currently. But on Windows 64-bit, AIR is something which may or may not work. So if you wanted to run AIR apps like Twhirl or TweetDeck on Vista 64 or Win 7 64, it might not even be possible presently.

Did you get Adobe AIR running on Windows Vista or 7 64-bit along with your favorite AIR apps? Let us know in the comments.

The second is a biggie, Adobe Flash. Some I’ve conversed with say Flash runs fine on 64-bit while others say it’s "tolerable" at best.

Did you get Adobe Flash running on your 64-bit Windows Vista or 7? Let us know in the comments on this one too as many would love to hear your experience.

Most people could live without AIR, but as for Flash, there are tons of web sites that simply require it. And going without Flash would be trying on the nerves to many.

USB sticks are hitting rock bottom prices these days. A 16GB stick is now under $30. And 8GB sizes are easily available for under $15.

However this is nowhere near as cost effective as burning DVDs. In fact it’s not even close.

The 16GB stick is $30. Put into cost per gigabyte, each gig costs $1.88.

A 100-pack spindle of Maxell (a mid-grade brand) 16x DVD-Rs at Wal-Mart costs about $25 for +R or -R, tax included. That’s 470GB worth of storage, and translates to about 5¢ per GB.

Big difference.

DVD’s biggest advantage is cost; it’s the cheapest way to store data. I don’t know of any other media that’s as cost effective.

However the single largest drawback of optical media is its life span. Premium optical media is supposed to last 10 years, but few of us (including myself) don’t buy premium grade. We buy whatever is on the shelf that’s immediately available. The life of the disc gets knocked down quite a bit with mid-grade brands. At best you might get 5 years out of it. Some are lucky and get more, but most of us don’t.

My suggestion to anyone who backs up routinely (which you all should do): For the time being, go optical because there’s nothing cheaper. Buy yourself a 100-pack, crank up your DVD burner and burn away. When Flash drives drop below 25 cents per GB (meaning a 16GB stick would cost under $5), move your data over.

Given the way Flash media price is dropping like a brick, the 25-cent-per-GB mark should occur well before the life span of your optical media is up.

Something interesting to think about is how long data will last, because as everyone knows, nothing is forever.

Here’s a rundown on how long you can expect the media you use to last.

"Media" defined: Data storage on something physical that you own, be it hard disk, optical, flash or tape. I don’t list floppy diskettes because nobody uses those anymore.

Assumptions:

• You are using the media a minimum once per week and when not in use is disconnected and/or unpowered from the electronic mechanism it uses to write data to and stored (ex: you take the DVD out of the drive, put it in a case and store it).
• You are physically storing your media in a dry place at room temperature (72° F / 22° C).

Hard Disk

A production-use hard disk usually has a life span of 3 to 5 years. Some last longer, but trust me there is a reason why most hard drive manufacturers usually do not have hardware warranties that go beyond 5 years.

A hard disk used for backup purposes lasts longer because it isn’t used as often. You can assume the HDD will last at least 7 years. But bear in mind that is an assumption.

As a short-term backup solution, hard disks are a good choice. As a long-term solution, not so much given their relatively short life span.

For more information, this really old (but still relevant) post from our own PCMech forums will give you tons of useful info concerning the life span of a hard disk drive.

Optical

Optical media that you use is CD, DVD, the now-defunct HD DVD and Blu-ray.

Assuming you have a decent CD/DVD burner drive, the life span of optical media almost exclusively depends on how well the disc was made.

Premium-grade media can easily last 10 years. And no, you won’t find it at Wal-Mart. The best possible writable CD/DVD media you can buy is manufactured by Taiyo Yuden. A Google search will reveal where to get some if so inclined. It is lauded as the best of the best. That’s because it is. And yes, you’ll pay good money for it too.

For the rest of us, there’s name brand and generic optical media. You can expect name brand (Memorex, Verbatim, etc.) to last about 5 years. Some of you out there will get 7 to 10 but I personally wouldn’t put that much faith into this type of media.

Concerning generic, the plastic may separate from the aluminum in less than a year. Not a good choice.

With optical media, yes, you get what you pay for concerning life span. No question.

Tip: It is better to store optical discs in jewel cases instead of books. Natural problems (like pages of discs sticking to each other from sitting there too long) can happen with those fold-out books.

Flash

It has been speculated that flash based media, such as a USB stick, will last 8 to 10 years easily. This is because there are no moving parts, the heat it generates is minimal and the way it connects and disconnects to a computer is nearly impossible to get wrong (and therefore almost impossible to break).

What most people will encounter with a USB stick in the future is expiring the amount of times data can be written to it or erased before age-related failure. Most USB sticks will allow one million write and/or erase cycles before it cannot be used any longer.

If a USB stick is used as backup media where it is only used once a week, it is highly unlikely you will ever tap that limit.

But the limit age-wise for data retention is stated to be 10 years and no longer at present.

Tip: You might want to use a label-maker and mark the stick with a date 9 years from now (this gives you enough buffer of time from date of manufacture). Who knows? You might still have it then. And you’ll know the stick will soon fail when the date marked is reached.

If you’re thinking, "How can I be sure USB will even be around in nine years?" It will be. Even if it is replaced by another technology, you will still be able to access the data on it somehow.

Think of it this way: Right now nobody uses floppy diskettes any longer, yet you can still buy a floppy diskette drive and disks easily. At worst, USB flash drives will end up like that. Woefully obsolete, but still accessible.

Tape

This is probably going to surprise a few of you, but premium grade tape backup can last 50 years. Sound ridiculous? It’s not. This method of backup is usually only used by large enterprise and government IT centers.

Tape is one of those things that is about as old-school as you can get when it comes to data storage. True, the technology has advanced, the cartridges are built better and the media can store much more and is more reliable, but the method of the way it works is still essentially unchanged.

Tape media is still readily available, but for those looking for the "big guns", what you would want is certified 30-year tape media. The one notch after that is the premium 50-year. Yes, it’s overkill for most people (and wickedly expensive), but if you want something that lasts longer than anything else, tape is basically your only option.

For those who think tape backup is dead as a doorknob, I beg to differ. Maybe it’s dead as a consumer option, but in enterprise it’s still widely used. Maybe you’re not enterprise, but you can use it. In fact, tape is still the best bang for the buck long-term storage media there is.

If you think tape may be right for you, here are a few things you should be aware of:

First, tape decks do require cleaning. The way to clean is with a tape head cleaner cartridge. The heads will need to be cleaned periodically to ensure proper data writes.

Second, transfer speeds are defined differently but you can assume they’re going to be on the slower side. No, they are not molasses-slow as tape drives were years ago because we’ve got USB connectivity now, but it is true they’re not lightning quick, nor have they ever been.

Third, tape is very particular to format. There’s DLT, SDLT, 1/2-inch, LTO, 4mm, 8mm and so on. When shopping around for a deck, pay strict attention to format and how easy (or not easy) it is to acquire media for it.

Will there ever be a long-term backup solution better than tape?

The only media I know of that could potentially outlast tape is the internet itself. But obviously the internet is not physical media. In fact it’s not even physical. The storage of the internet is termed as putting data "in the cloud". However there are more than a few out there that would rather have media stored safely in a closet or attic rather than on some distant server run by someone else.

Chances are you’re more comfortable with the "un-clouded" way.

What’s the most convenient solution right now?

Tape may be the longest lasting, but USB sticks are the most convenient.

You can most likely fit every digital photo you’ve ever taken on a 4GB stick. And that’s under $15 to acquire.

You can most likely fit every email you have on a 2GB stick. And those are under $10.

As long as you remember to swap the sticks out once every 8 to 10 years, you’re in good shape.

That is unless you leave one in your pants pocket and run it thru a wash cycle while doing the laundry.

What do you use for backup media?

Do you use CD/DVDs? USB sticks? Tape? The internet itself? A combination?

Let us know by writing a comment.

The days of linear format camcorders are dying. Linear as it relates to camcorders is anything using slack that requires rewinding or fast-forwarding. And to be honest I’m not sorry to see them go. This is more or less the last in line of tech products to get "off the slack", so to speak.

There are many of you out there who still have MiniDV videocassette format camcorders. Since day one I have always hated MiniDV. It’s not the cassette itself I hate, it’s the fact the decks in camcorders that use them are notoriously unreliable. This is partly due because of the cookie-cutter style method of manufacturing that goes into these things (even the expensive ones).

For those that remember VHS camcorders, those things were built like tanks and lasted a good long time. You could pop in and out VHS tapes to your heart’s content and it wouldn’t bust.

MiniDV on the other hand is something you have to treat gingerly. It’s almost as if you have to say a little prayer each time you load in a cassette. "Oh please, don’t break on me. Pretty please. I treat you well. You know I do." Your prayers won’t matter because your MiniDV camcorder can and will break at the worst possible time and is very subject to Murphy’s Law.

Fortunately it’s relatively cheap to ditch the slack, say buh-bye to MiniDV and go with non-linear flash, optical or hard disk camcorders.

For the vast majority of you that do non-pro video recording, a Flip will work. I personally have one of these things. The fact I can get 60 minutes of very decent quality record time on a unit powered by two AA batteries is nothing short of miraculous. Granted, the zoom feature sucks and it can’t do close-ups very well, but the convenience more than makes up for it. And it even has a tripod mount. Currently they sell for just under $130. And yes, you should get one. By the way, the USB port on it is built in.

"But I need better quality", you say. Then go with optical (or more specifically, the 8cm DVD disc format). For under $300 you can get yourself quite a nice Canon.

"But I hate discs", you say. Then go with hard-disk based units. These aren’t cheap. The lowest price is just a tick under $350. From there they spike over $600 easily. Do they have the super-awesome quality you’re looking for? Absolutely. It is for all intents and purposes a pro-grade unit.

Ditch your MiniDV and step into the modern age. It’s time.

Sign of the times: I go into Walgreen’s the other day to pick up a bag of cashews (they’re quite tasty), and in the photo center I spot 4GB USB sticks for $16. Yes, I know you can pick up these things for cheaper elsewhere, but the fact a business primarily known as a pharmacy carries these things is what got my attention.

The brand Walgreen’s carried was obviously generic and not something you’d recognize. This got me wondering whether there is a true difference quality and reliability-wise concerning the flash memory inside a USB stick from one brand to the next.

Curious, I searched the internet to see if anyone has done any testing of flash memory reliability on a brand level.

One such place is CNET and they have a whole section on it. It includes just about every type of flash memory you can imagine with editors reviews, video and so on. The brand you have right now might be listed there, so you can see how it fared out.

The 2 top-rated brands for USB sticks are Sandisk and Lexar.

For everything else, the two top complaints are usually the same concerning USB sticks, that being "slow write speed" and design complaints (i.e. the plastic cap falls off easily, flimsy covering, etc.)

It would appear that yes, there are notable differences from one brand to the next. While a design flaw may be something most people could live with, slow write speeds would drive anyone bonkers (especially considering USB 2.0 transfer speeds are already slow to begin with).

The advice of the moment I give is this:

If you see some generic brand of USB stick, it’s a crapshoot whether or not the design will be solid or flimsy, and whether or not the data transfer will be speedy or not. It might be a few extra bucks for a Sandisk cruzer, but at least you’ll know what you buy will work optimally as it should.

(And by the way, yes the previous link will show you some 16GB versions of Sandisk cruzers. Pretty neat you can put 16GB in your pocket, eh?)

When your Windows operating system reads a file off a hard-disk, it’s reading a file stored in lots of little bits -usually 512-bit chunks in NTFS. Your operating system doesn’t always, in fact rarely does it, write to the disk putting all of the separate 512-bit chunks next to each other. Sometimes different chunks get put far away from one another, in fact. A file could end up getting spread all over the hard-disk at random.

When you run a defragmenter, it puts all those little bits of file closer together, usually consecutively, so that the heads take less time finding them. Moving the read-write heads takes time and with the electromechanical hard-drive being the slowest component and greatest bottleneck for data in the computer as it is, the last thing you want it to do is go any slower. (The standard hard-drive is the only component with moving parts: All other devices – except for fans – are solid-state.) The defragmentation process ensures that the file data is contiguous so that the head doesn’t require so much movement, and thus the read time is faster.

Flash drives don’t have a read/write head. In fact flash drives don’t have any moving parts. The flash drive’s electronics present the drive to the computer as a standard hard-drive by mimickery, but the data-storage is accomplished by so-called “flash-cells” which consist of a number of transistors each, rather than a set of spinning platters.

Defragmenting a flash drive will get you very few, if any, performance increases other than perhaps a slightly increased write-time on certain drives. As there are no read/write heads to move, there is no additional time spent retrieving data from any separate flash-cells, no matter how far apart they may be. What defragmenting will do though is wear the flash-cells out faster.

When a write is made to any given flash-cell, it causes a tiny amount of degradation in the components of that cell. This might not be true to such an extent much longer, as the underlying technology is constantly improving, but nevertheless, at present and probably for a long time into the future, it will be the case to some extent. The more you write to a flash-device, the shorter its life will be. Normal usage is OK; but it still won’t last forever. (What does?)

Regularly defragmenting it unnecessarily, however, will add many thousands of write operations whenever you do it, and might even halve its lifespan.

Defragment your electromechanical (standard) hard-drives regularly and it will improve file performance. Defragment a flash or SSD drive, though, and you’re just wearing it out for no good reason.

Since the release of Mozilla Firefox 3 there have been issues with the Adobe Flash player (currently at release 9), particularly with Flash video. What happens is that you’ll attempt to watch a video (say on YouTube) and the first 2 seconds will play and then stop. And you’re left with no choice but to restart the browser and sometimes that doesn’t even work.

There is a Flash 10 beta available right now if you want to use it. It’s recently been updated for both Windows and Mac. Personally speaking I won’t be using it because all I have to do is that if Flash bugs up on me I just go into Internet Explorer 7 and everything is okey-dokey. I figure if I want to view a Flash video that bad, going to another browser just for that video doesn’t bother me.

So if you’re a Firefox user and have been experiencing that maddening 2-second-and-stop issue, it’s not your fault. When version 10 of the Adobe Player is officially released it should resolve that issue.

There are more than a few people out there who would find it quite handy to be able to run Windows XP off a USB stick (or hard drive in a caddy). I was also interested to know if this was possible to do.

The Big Question: Is it possible?

Answer: Yes.

However it is a humongous pain in the butt to get working.

The best write-up I found on how to get XP running off a flash drive is from Ngine.de, appropriately titled How to install and run a FULL Windows XP from a USB drive. It is very thorough.

The biggest hurdle to cross is the TXTSETUP.SIF file (as well as a few INF files). What XP does is attempt to load USB stuff on boot which in effect "kills" any USB-based installation, so you have to dig into a text editor and "correct" it manually.

If you’re determined enough, you can get this to work. I was going to try this myself, but after seeing all the b.s. involved I said "Nah".

There are other guides available on how to do this (including those that recommend using BartPE), but no matter how you look at it, it’s just a long laborious process.

I only recommend trying this to those who have time to kill.

Solid State Drives (SSD) are inevitably what are going to replace our existing hard disk drives. For those not aware of what the difference is between the two, traditional hard drives have moving parts on the inside while SSDs so not. You can consider them "big flash drives".

SSD is above and beyond superior to HDD in every way except space for the time being. The biggest one you can get within a reasonable price point is 128GB for just a tick over 400 USD.

However the single largest problem is that SSDs don’t exactly "agree" with BIOSes from several manufacturers. One of the more popular drives at present is the OCZ Core Series 128GB Sata II, however the customer feedback is less than stellar on this product. Some are reporting slow access times, spotty write methods and a whole host of other bad stuff. But it also should be noted some have had no issues at all.

OCZ has been on the ball with this product (as you’ll see from the link above) and has been responding as best they can to this evolving technology, urging people to discuss the product in their forums whether you think it’s good, bad or indifferent.

For those thinking about SSD, I do recommend reading up on what people have been saying about it. It’s still an expensive tech and is a good read for those thinking about plunking down a few hundred smacks just to be on the bleeding edge, so to speak.

When the first consumer-grade portable video recording systems were introduced they were humongous and had extremely poor battery life. In addition to that they were heavy and gave you "camcorder shoulder" in short order.

As camcorders progressed in technology they started to become smaller but suffered from the same fate as their predecessors – they were stuck using linear recording mediums (VHS, Hi8, VHS-C, miniDV, etc.)

Further down the line, optical media was introduced in the form of direct-to-disc DVD both full-sized and 8cm-size.

For professional videographers, you still can’t escape tape. Not cost effectively anyway.

For everyone else, you can ditch your tapes and discs now by using a camcorder with built-in flash memory. No tapes. No discs.

Most people have seen the Pure Digital Flip camcorder. I have used one of these myself and can honestly say that yes, you will instantly love this thing compared to a traditional tape or optical media camcorder. First of all, it’s cheap (just over 100 bucks). Second, it’s stupidly easy to use. There is zero learning curve with one of these things. Third, everyone has USB and fourth (the best part), it runs on just 2 AA batteries. No need to hunt around for expensive proprietary camcorder battery nonsense.

For those interested it records up to 1 hour of video and yes it does have a zoom feature.

I know what you’re saying.

"I want HD in the palm of my hand!"

Ask and ye shall receive:

Above is the Sony Xacti HDTV tapeless camcorder. And yes it’s true-blue HD. The cost of this unit was last known to be $468. Yes, it’s a good coin for this but it is HD in the palm of your hand. Rock on, flash memory.

Flash (in my opinion the worst thing that has happened to the Internet, but that is a subject for another day) is now another vehicle for malicious software attacks. According to this article (which is highly technical) by merely visiting an site which has an infected Flash banner ad you are subject to an exploit. For an example, check out this particular case of one on USA Today’s site.

It seems to be debatable as to whether or not the latest Flash client addresses the problem (the exploit is embedded to the file on the server), but regardless the safest measure is to simply disable Flash on your browser. Using IE7Pro for Internet Explorer or Flashblock for Firefox, you can selectively enable when you want Flash content to be displayed.

Not only do we have to deal with the utterly worthless “Flash intro’s” (who watches these anyway?), but now malicious exploits. Surely something else can come along and replace Flash for the only use it has which is a web video player.