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This bad boy isn’t your daddy’s USB porn drive (but maybe it should be). It’s the real deal for keeping your data safe and secure.

The IronKey USB flash drive is one of the most secure devices I’ve ever worked with, but simultaneously tries to be–and achieves being–among the simplest to interact with in achieving that security. The product, from the eponymous company IronKey, comes in capacities from 1 GB to 8 GB that encrypts data five ways to Sunday while achieving government certification as tamper evident. A secured, anonymized version of Firefox is also onboard. Prices start at $79 including a one-year subscription for anonymous browsing; an 8 GB drive is $299…

For starters, there’s hardware AES encryption on board the sleek metal drive: there’s no software to install on a host computer, and all encryption happens within the drive. This dramatically improves the security profile. Encryption keys are stored only on the drive, and only unlocked when a password you create at the time you initialize the drive is entered. (IronKey lets you back that password up on their secure Web servers with additional layers of authentication in case you forget it; accessing your account requires a digital certificate stored on the IronKey.)

Enter the password incorrectly 10 times, and the hardware fries itself. Likewise, if an IronKey is physically tampered with in an attempt to access the on-board flash memory directly, the hardware wipes memory as well. Their tamper-resistance has led to FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validation by the U.S. and Canadian governments–physical tampering must be evident–and they’re working on Level 3, which requires countermeasures to attempts to disassemble the hardware…

Anyone surprised about this at all? Measure, counter-measure, new measure, new counter-measure, etc,. There is a lot of money spent in what may never be obtainable and plenty of nuisance for consumers who simply want to back up their movies. In the 80s I used to purchase a new album, purchase a blank tape, play the album once and back it to tape then only play the tape until it wore out, broke, got lost, or… got melted on (or to) the car’s dashboard. Then a second playing of the pristine condition album was performed to make another backup for use while the original was safely tucked away.

If you are a parent of a child or teen that you have graciously allowed to have a DVD player in their room you may wish to allow said child or teen to play one of your well cared-for DVDs only to see it returned in a condition much reminiscent of something that was dragged down a dusty rocky road in the old West. A backup would come in handy in this situation. Your DVD player could one day break down and spin your DVD in a strange way that makes it unplayable. The door could accidentally close on your DVD. Of course those that make money on you buying the DVD in the first place want you to buy the same movie over and over and over.

There are more stories every other day about this HD DVD war and “who will win?” I loved 300 but… I knew who was winning and who wasn’t. Reality has to settle in at some point as this stand is nowhere near as sexy or meaningful. OK. OK. I know the Giants recently defied great odds and beat the Patriots (I picked them to win by 3 btw : ) ) but this format “war” is ridiculous at this point, IMHO. Today, there are a couple more giants jumping to Blu-ray over HD-DVD: Best Buy and Netflix. The momentum has been growing for a while now and looks to be too fast to stop.

Best Buy, the largest U.S. consumer electronics chain, said on Monday it will recommend that consumers choose Sony Corp’s Blu-ray high-definition video format.

The decision gives Sony yet another victory in the battle with Toshiba Corp’s HD DVD to be the high-definition DVD format of choice.

Earlier on Monday, online video rental company Netflix Inc (NFLX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said it would exclusively stock Blu-ray DVDs after some of the world’s biggest movie studios decided in favor of that format.

Best Buy said it believes consumers will benefit from the choice of one HD DVD format.

“Because we believe that Blu-ray is fast emerging as that single format, we have decided to focus on Blu-ray products,” Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

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Flash drives, or SSD drives, might be the wave of the future, but they’re still much to expensive to really be practical in today’s computers. Even though they save energy and are faster than their platter-based cousins, we just aren’t ready for the switch. They don’t have big enough capacities and their pricetags are astronomical.

Seagate knows that total acceptance of flash-based drives is still a few years off, but that isn’t stopping them from using the tech to improve their current hard drives. Their new hybrid drives are large platter hard drives that have an additional 256MB of flash memory built-in. This helps the computer boot up 25% faster and cut the power consumption of the drives by 50%. Pretty awesome, right? Well, in theory, yes. The problem is, Microsoft’s Vista doesn’t quite know how to handle the new drives despite Microsoft’s claims to the contrary. Until an update gets Vista’s act together, these drives can’t fulfill their true potential. Hopefully everything will be worked out soon and we can look forward to using these drives in the near future.

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“The use of powerful graphics is not limited to just games anymore. Many of today’s most popular business and consumer applications, including Adobe Acrobat, Second Life, and Apple iTunes are optimized for the power of a modern GPU,” said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research (JPR), a leading market research firm based in Tiburon, CA. “With their new GeForce mGPUs, NVIDIA is pioneering the development of new graphics technologies that are helping to evolve the capabilities of mainstream PC platforms. Customers understand that their overall PC experience is largely defined by the graphics processors. Anyone, from a seasoned IT pro to a college student can compare the PC experience delivered by NVIDIA mGPUs against any traditional integrated graphics solution and realize the dramatic impact a modern GPU can make.”

The NVIDIA GeForce 7150 mGPU delivers the performance of an entry-level discrete GPU and leading graphics compatibility when compared against traditional integrated graphics solutions. The GeForce 7150, 7100, and 7050 mGPUs are designed to support a full range of Intel CPUs (Core 2, Pentium, and Celeron CPU families), including upcoming 45nm Intel “Penryn” processors and other new features, such as 1333MHz frontside bus technology. In addition to delivering an unparalleled graphics experience to mainstream PCs, the GeForce 7-Series mGPUs support optional HDMI or DVI digital output capability to enable the playback of protected digital content directly from the PC to high- definition televisions and other displays.

Designed as single chip solutions for cost-effective PC system integration for both AMD and Intel platforms, all NVIDIA GeForce 7-Series mGPUs enable the premium graphics experience on Windows Vista, and incorporate NVIDIA nForce core-logic functionality, including advanced storage and networking features for powering today’s connected digital lifestyles…

Much of the focus was on Harpertown, a 45nm quad-core version of Xeon with 12MB of cache, running in conjunction with Stokley, which support a 1600 MHz front side bus. Intel will also be releasing Wolfdale, a dual-core version with 6MB of cache. Although Penryn is primary a shrink of the existing architecture, rather than a complete new architecture, the new chips do s have some new features, notably including more cache and support for the faster bus; as well as a new divider that is supposed to be faster, and new SSE4 instructions…

The Tech Report compared a 3GHz Harpertown Xeon E5472 (expected to be released Nov. 12) against a 2.5GHz AMD “Barcelona” Opteron 2360SE (expected by the end of the year) and found that the Xeon pretty much won all the tests. The Xeon beat the Operton by 4% at Specjbb (a server business logic benchmark), the new Xeon beat an older 3GHz Clovertown Xeon by about 10%; and the 2.5GHz AMD part by about 4%. On almost all the other tests, Harpertown does even better, ahead of Barcelona by 20 to 34% in real world applications (and more in some synthetic benchmarks I’m more skeptical about).

Anandtech has even more benchmarks, most showing Intel ahead by 27% to as much as 60% (though I’m skeptical of the later tests). But it shows AMD ahead on performance/watt (with a larger improvement the less work is being done), almost certainly because of the more efficient memory scheme.

Both Barcelona and Harpertown seem to have some headroom in clock speeds. AMD is only shipping 2GHz now, but has promised 2.5GHz for December; let’s hope it can eventually match the 3GHz clock that Harpertown will start with.

System builders who received samples a week or two ahead of today’s worldwide launch say they aren’t ready to issue benchmarks just yet. Nevertheless, sources tell ChannelWeb that the processor AMD calls “the first native quad-core” is faster than they had anticipated. They say three key advances are testing out as advertised — a tri-level memory cache hierarchy with fully shared L3 cache for all four cores, a floating point unit with 2×128-bit loads/cycle, and independent power supplies for each of the processor’s four cores and to the memory controller. The last feature distinguishes AMD’s quad-core product from Intel’s, in that it’s possible to idle one, two or three CPU cores for a workload to better manage power consumption.

CMP Channel’s Test Center last week received an engineering sample server equipped with dual Barcelona CPUs. After putting it through its paces, Frank Ohlhorst reports, “Those who have waited for the arrival of AMD’s next generation CPU won’t be disappointed.”

As far as pricing, AMD is remaining tight-lipped about how it plans to scale its new quad-cores against Intel’s or its own dual-core chips. Partners in the know say Barcelona will be “competitively priced.” Market watchers say it will have to be, given Intel’s recent slashing of its own quad-core prices down to levels nearly in line with its Core 2 Duo products.

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If you have set aside a cool US$1100 for your processor alone at the time of this review release, then you should take a look at the QX6850 I will be reviewing today.

With four 8MB cache supported independent processing on-die units blistering along at 3.0Ghz, this latest Core 2 Extreme processor release from Intel at 1333Mhz front side bus sets the bar of what a consumer available processor can reach at this time. The QX6850 is currently holding the performance belt and by what is seen developing in the market from the competition, the only thing that will be beating it will be the next quad-core release from Intel (which will be within about 6 months).

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Iomega has announced their new storage solution which goes into the NAS (Network-attached storage) category, so multiple computers have access to the data. It is named Home Network Hard Drive.

The new hard-drive is available in 3 different storage sizes: 320GB, 360GB, and 500GB. It can be accessed on a network mode thanks to the 10/100 Ethernet port, or you can simply use the USB interface and connect it to an unique computer.

Each drive contains a single 7,200rpm SATA-II drive with an 8MB cache.

While the 320GB and 500GB versions are already available, for $150 and $200 correspondingly, the 360GB version will only hit the shelves on late September.

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Finally, Western Digital is leading the hard disk industry in bring out energy saving hard disk, according to source, The GreenPower family will ship in capacities from 320 Gbytes to 1 terabyte and will use 40% less energy than other similar products.

The GreenPower drives only consume about 8.5 watts compare to Hitachi’s 13.5 watts, currently it is only available in 3.5 inch format, if Western Digital has the ability to further reduce the energy consumption and comes in a 2.5 inch format for the laptop, they have a winner.

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