October 11, 2007                                                                                                                                           

HI CAPACITY, LOW COST

It was recently announced that two professors of physics were awarded the Noble prize for their discovery of GMR or Giant Magnetoresistance.  Why does this matter to you?  Well, if you are using a hard drive produced post-1997 (most of us are) then you can thank Albert Fert, of Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/THALES, Université Paris-Sud, in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, of Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.  That’s a lot to remember so how about old Al and Pete.  These 2 guys discovered this technology allowing hard drive manufacturers to radically shrink hard drives and raise the capacity at the same time.  Micro drives are becoming very popular and their capacity is such that you can put a full blown Windows XP operating system on them.  These drives are about the size of a pocket watch, only thinner.  So you can thank old Al and Pete for all that space you have to store all those pictures, all that video, and all the other worthless junk you’ll never use again.

Speaking of large capacity, the 1TB hard drives are now readily available.  For around $400 you can get a single 1000GB hard drive to hold all that junk.  This drastic change in capacity is evident when you see those numbers and then you realize that a 320GB hard drive is now the sweet spot at well under a C note.  Tiny 80GB drives are also still readily available.

The Intel Core 2 Duo with 1333Mhz FSB and 4MB cache are now becoming the norm.  Many are now priced below the 1066FSB chips so be careful.  They are currently listed under the OEM processors even though they are boxed.  We’ll fix that.

I know this newsletter isn’t as timely as it should be, again.  Sorry about that.   We recently switched to a new ISP and telephone provider.  Doing all of that at once can be somewhat stressful.  Our phone and internet were out several times over several days.  We seem to be stable again now.  Our toll-free number just came back on line a couple of days ago.  You may notice that some of the larger pages on the web pricelist take a while to load.  The latency with this new provider is somewhat pathetic and the bandwidth isn’t always there.  However, they assured me by the end of the year we were going to see a major improvement.  We’ll give them until then.

As always, call us for the latest price and availability.

Shift Wholesale