I kissed a flash, and I liked it…

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Someone was asking about SSD drive upgrades in a comment thread; I just took a bit of a risk and tried the OCZ Apex Series 120GB inside my two-ish year old MacBook Pro.

You want the short summary? It works. And how: the machine boots in a shade over 4 seconds.

The detail is where the devil lives, of course. This wasn’t a full test, by any means – i got a recommendation from a mate and thought the risk worth taking: I wanted to extend the life of the trusty MacBook but if it turned out the whole idea was a non-starter I could always use the SSD in a more mainstream laptop, and I wanted to see if the claimed advances in flash architecture really did make the whole concept more usable. Well, that and a conversation with the guys at Overclockers who instantly categorised all the cheaper options by a four-letter word rhyming with “trap”. But then, vendors with new expensive things to sell often do that…

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Protecting your data, the hard way

Friday, June 13th, 2008

With all the critical media coverage of high-profile data losses in recent months (much of it here on PC Pro), it’s no wonder that people are thinking more and more about their own data security. It makes sense to be paranoid, to a certain extent, but it’s easy to go too far. (more…)