Amazon Prime Air Delivery Drones

These days just about everyone uses online shopping to some extent in their everyday lives. Whether you buy things from eBay, Amazon or some other online store one of biggest issues is you want the item now. Often it's a choice between go to a brick and mortar store and buy the item right then and now or order it online for less money but wait a week or two for it to arrive. Of course there is the option of paying for faster shipping like one or two days but that usually will negate all the money you would be saving buying it online.

Amazon is now looking to solve this issue and let you buy online and have it delivered in record speeds. From what I have been able to gather the delivery with drones will have a couple of speed options such as within 30 minutes or 2 hours. If you are an Amazon Prime member you can select the 2 hour option at no additional charge. If you want the item delivered within 30 minutes that will be an additional $7.99.

Let's talk a little about the drones themselves and what they can do. Nowadays most people are becoming familiar with drones, small multi-wing airplanes that people fly around as a hobby. Amazon is taking that idea and going further. Their drones will be unmanned and rely on software programming to get them safely to their destination to drop off the package and then fly back to home base. These drones will be able to hold packages that weigh up to 5 pounds and will fly at altitudes up to 400 feet. Amazon says the drones software will use "sense and avoid" technology to safely operate in the air. So far Amazon has Prime Air development centers in the USA, UK and Israel.

I for one am super excited about these drones and can't wait to see them in action. Unfortunately, I live in Canada so like most things up here once it has been working in the USA for a couple of years it will hopefully make its way up north.

Prime Air Drone

PCWorld.com M2 PCI-E SSD's

As we all know the creation of SSD's has been one of the biggest things in computers lately.   Old mechanical hard drives were the bottleneck on many computers throughout the world. In came SSD's and all of a sudden the same computers that took several minutes to boot now took a matter of seconds.

Now we want even faster speeds and people have realized the limitations of traditional SSD's the SATA Cable. The current SATA version 3.0 has a maximum bandwidth of 6 Gb/s. A PCI-E X16 slot has a maximum bandwidth of 16 GB/s. Notice the SATA is measured in Gigabits while the PCI-E is in Gigabytes. This means the PCI-E X16 is theoretically around 20 times faster than SATA.

Therefore why not create SSD's that plugged into the PCI-E bus?
This is exactly what has been coming out lately.


Check out some of the latest and greatest in PCI-E SSD's in the full article here:

PC World

Howtogeek.com USB Type C

One Cable To Rule Them All

We all know that one of the most irritating things about USB cables is how they come in so many different types. Yet since we rely on them so much each and every day we have come to terms with the fact that we must put up with them.

Most people are familiar with the standard USB type A that plugs into the computer as that is pretty much in every computer and laptop. The problem lies in all the other types such as Micro B and Mini A and B that are used in many different devices such as phones and cameras.

We all now the struggle of needing to replace one of these cables and first having to lookup a picture to see which cable we are actually using. We wonder why the same cable that charges my phone can't charge someone else’s phone.

Now comes USB type C a cable that can and will replace all other USB types. With this one cable we will be able to charge any person phone and connect to any camera. This will of course take many years to completely rid ourselves of the old technology that is still using the old USB connectors. As more and more time passes more and more devices will have USB type C and hopefully only USB type C.

With USB type C it does not matter which way you put the cable in, there is no top or bottom the connector is symmetrical USB type C is also cable of carrying HDMI and DisplayPort so you will no longer need to use special cables for that as well. Although of course you will need the HDMI or DisplayPort adapter on one end. USB type C is compatible with the newer USB 3.0 and 3.1 specifications allowing speeds of up to 5 Gbps for 3.0 and 10 Gbps 3.1 which will make transferring data quite speedy.

Overall USB type C looks to be a promising and very welcome addition to the USB family that solves many of the issues with its predecessors.

How-To Geek

PCWorld.com Interesting Article on Mini PC's

Personal Computers continue to get smaller and smaller and more powerful every year. Nowadays you can purchase computers the size of USB thumb sticks that are as powerful as your smartphone. They can play games and stream 1080p video.


Check out the full article here:

PC World

Samsungs New 128 GB RAM Modules

In recent years both the speed and size of DIMM modules has been increasing rapidly. The companies that make RAM have been able to pack more and more storage space into DIMM's that have not increased in physical size. Currently the largest single DIMM you can buy is 64 GB.

Late last year Samsung was the first company to unveil their new 128 GB DIMM which is of course twice the size of the previous 64 GB module. This 128 GB DIMM is running DDR4 and packs 36 individual 4 GB chunks of 3D TSV DRAM. There are servers that have up to 96 DIMM slots meaning they could theoretical have 12.2 Terabytes of RAM in one server.

HP's current top of the line enterprise workstation allows the use of 128 GB RAM modules and with 16 slots you can put a maximum of 2 Terabytes of memory into a single workstation. I can't image a workstation ever needing that much memory but perhaps in a few years that will change.

There does not seem to be any information on the cost of these new RAM modules so far. Seeing as how 64 GB RAM modules currently go for over $1000 it's safe to say it will be expensive.

The Register HP Z840 Workstation

Worlds Biggest Solid State Drives

With the rise of SSD's the focus now has been on two main things, faster write and read speeds and increasing the storage capacity. Most people in their home PC's are using 128 or 256 Gigabyte drives as SSD's are still considered expensive. As each month passes by the prices continue to drop and even 512 GB or 1 TB drives are becoming reasonably priced for the average consumer.

In the enterprise market the cost is not such a factor and companies with large amounts of data want bigger and bigger SSD's to put in their storage servers. Fixstar has unveiled their largest SSD yet with boosts a whopping 13 TB of storage space but comes with a price to match it around $13,000 USD. It has read speeds of up 580 MB/s and write speeds of up 520 MB/s which is considered pretty good for an SSD with a SATA 3 interface.

Not to be outdone Samsung has unveiled an even bigger SSD which comes in at an incredible size of 16 TB. This was accomplished by Samsung doubling the size of its current flash chips to 256 GB each. This drive also boasts the ability of 1 DWPD (drive writes per day) this means that you can write 16 TB of data to the drive each and every day without failure. This is the kind of reliability that enterprise storage systems will need. No word yet on the cost but something in the realm of $1,000 per TB so $16,000 USD seems about right.

PC World Fixstar PC World Samsung