The digital camera revolution has changed the stock photography business giving opportunity to hobbyists and low-cost but great looking stock photos to small businesses.  Sites like iStockPhoto.com and Shutterstock.com are the leaders in this category. iStockPhoto.com has over 3,500,000 photos available for purchase. According to this article in Forbes, some hobbyists are making up to $10k per month! It is an amazing business for all involved!  

There are currently 50 companies that offer SSD drives. The major players are Intel, Micro, Sandisk, Toshiba and Samsung.  According to an EETime article, although currently high priced, the sweet spot would be 256gb drives for laptops in the $800-$1000 range. The pressure is on to lower prices and the competition will be fierce! Expect some great deals within a year!

SSD “performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the
market really needs“, admitted Harari at the company’s earnings
conference this week.

Why not? According to Harari, it’s because “Vista is not optimised for Flash memory solid-state disks”.

Drama - read Tom’s Hardware Review.

“The results of our testing are a shock for anyone who cares about battery runtime, as our results prove unmistakably that battery runtimes do not increase when using flash based SSDs. As a matter of fact, most flash SSD products actually contribute to emptying your battery even faster! Mainstream flash SSDs — if they can even be called “mainstream” at prices of $500 and up — do not even provide convincing performance while they help to suck your battery empty quicker than before.”

New laptop bags, with a fold-down section or a stand-alone protective sleeve to give the X-ray machines a clear shot, have just been cleared by the T.S.A. for faster travel through airport security. Pathfinder Luggage and Targus will be the first manufacturers to offer these bags in early fall.

In 2007 the SSD market generated $400 million in revenue. Shipment growth is expected to go through the roof at over 76% per year! The traditional government, military and industrial markets will give way to growth through the business and consumer sectors.

Great article at MobileMag on making your own SATA SSD with the Century DIY SSD Kit and 2 32gb CompactFlash!

An article on News.com states that a large manufacturer (read: Dell) is getting a return rate “an order of magnitude higher” on flash based notebooks versus standard HDD notebooks. The return rates are between 10-20% compared to 1-2% for traditional hard drives. It seems that a Samsung SSD drive is to blame for lackluster performance.

The price to add on a SSD drive - $900!

As this nascent industry grows up these problems will dissipate. More demand will create better products at lower cost.

The best fact of this article: current flash sells for around $3/GB…a 50% decline from last quarter of last year.

Many new announcements in the solid state hard drive world from CES. Samsung is touting their new 128gb SSD drive. OQO stuffs a 64gb drive into their 02 model. BiTMICRO is launching an 832gb solid state drive!!  Ritek releases SSD drives in 32gb, 64gb and 128gb capacities. Sandisk shows of a 72gb drive only available to OEM’s. The Asus U2E 32gb SSD high-end notebook. Lexar internal/external 32gb and 64gb drives. Imation and Mtron partner to release 2 new drives.

Seagate continues to rapidly expand their channel for data recovery services.  Previously in 14,000 stores…now adds another 1,400 through Staples.  Interestingly, it seems that all recovery is done in house at Staples stores.  I doubt this highly. Most likely a problem hard drive is sent off to a central location for recovery.