Gadgets
fromZDNET
2 days agoWhy I'm ditching my cheap PC cloning software for this M.2 dock that's highly functional
Icy Box Docking and CloneStation is a versatile tool for accessing and cloning various types of drives without tools.
Both work with Linux's existing swapping mechanism. Swapping (called paging in Windows) is a way for the kernel to handle running low on available RAM. It chooses pages of memory that aren't in use right now and copies them to disk, then those blocks can be marked as free and reused for something else.
The company has developed 16 gigabit LPDDR6 chips that will be used in smartphones and tablets with on-device AI. Bandwidth-hungry AI tasks will see a 33% speed-up in data processing compared to LPDDR5X. The new RAM has a base operating speed of 10.7Gbps.
Intel hasn't made it easy to buy a flagship desktop chip. The company's 2022 and 2023 Raptor Lake chips ran hot, power-hungry, and had those infamous crashes, while 2024's Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 9 285K had lackluster gaming performance that the company has tried to address with updates.
The new version combines lower costs with improved cybersecurity and offers up to 2 petabytes of storage in a 2U rack space. Companies are struggling with explosive data growth, increasing cyber threats, and limited budgets. Dell Technologies is responding to this with PowerStore 4.3, a platform that addresses storage challenges without compromising performance or security. The latest version brings innovations that double storage density and reduce energy costs.
At that point, backpressure and load shedding are the only things that retain a system that can still operate. If you have ever been in a Starbucks overwhelmed by mobile orders, you know the feeling. The in-store experience breaks down. You no longer know how many orders are ahead of you. There is no clear line, no reliable wait estimate, and often no real cancellation path unless you escalate and make noise.
As investors turned their back on software (notably, the seat-based software-as-a-service companies), they're turned towards hardware in a big-time way. You wouldn't know it by looking at those flat shares of Nvidia ( NASDAQ:NVDA), but the iShares Semiconductor ETF ( NASDAQ:SOXX) is up around 13% year to date, with few signs of slowing down. The winners within semis have been broad, but the undisputed kings of the 2026 semiconductor surge belongs to the memory and storage stocks.
AMD clarified those estimates are based on a comparison between an eight-GPU MI300X node and an MI500 rack system with an unspecified number of GPUs. The math works out to eight MI300Xs that are 1000x less powerful than X-number of MI500Xs. And since we know essentially nothing about the chip besides that it'll ship in 2027, pair TSMC's 2nm process tech with AMD's CDNA 6 compute architecture, and use HBM4e memory, we can't even begin to estimate what that 1000x claim actually means.
Intel is making a new push into GPUs, this time with a focus on data center workloads, as the chipmaker looks to reestablish itself in a market increasingly shaped by AI-driven demand and dominated by Nvidia. CEO Lip-Bu Tan said that after hiring a senior GPU architect, the company is working directly with customers to define requirements, signaling a more demand-driven approach as enterprises and cloud providers weigh their options for accelerated computing, according to a Reuters report.
The Xeon 600 lineup spans the gamut between 12 and 86 performance cores (no cut-down efficiency cores here), with support for between four and eight channels of DDR5 and 80 to 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity. Compared to its aging W-3500-series chips, Intel is claiming a 9 percent uplift in single threaded workloads and up to 61 percent higher performance in multithreaded jobs, thanks in no small part to an additional 22 processor cores this generation.
With this setup, the Samsung SSD achieved read speeds of roughly 4,000 MB/s and write speeds of about 1,300 MB/s. Those are great numbers. Accessing files felt instantaneous. It took no time at all to open the movie I stored inside the drive. The read speed also shows that the enclosure isn't restricting the drive. It's making full use of the Thunderbolt connection. Writing large files is equally impressive, letting users save big files fast.
In the not-so-distant past, the solution for boosting the speed of an aging, sluggish PC was to add more RAM or upgrade the processor. Now, the way to sail over that speed bump is to get a new storage drive, and there's no better storage upgrade for performance than fitting your system with an M.2 drive. Also: What is MoCA 2.5? How this low-cost networking option can seriously improve your internet There is no shortage of excellent M.2 drives out there, but if you're looking for high-end performance and stability when the going gets tough, the is well worth a look.
Well, you can, but there are a couple of features that are pretty specific to the Raspberry Pi Flash Drive. The first is SMART health reporting and support for TRIM. While I've come across a few drives that had the chips to do this, I can't think of any other flash drives off the top of my head that offer this.
If you buy digital games for the Nintendo Switch 2, Samsung's P9 microSD Express card offers an easier way to expand your storage without constantly deleting games to make room. It's cheaper than other microSD cards, and it's even better value right now, with the 512GB version priced at $79.99 ($40 off) - just $5 shy of its best price to date. You can alternatively buy the 256GB model for $39.99 ($15 off) at Amazon.
At CES, I did what you're not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It's a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Going into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop running an unreleased processor sounds like a recipe for disaster.