New ADSL speeds and solid state drives pave the future

By Imran Khan

Telkom to Upgrade Speeds:
Telkom, South Africa’s only fixed line Communications Company has announced that it will be upgrading its ADSL line speed offerings soon. The 1024 Kilobyte per second line, or 1 Meg line as we know it, will be upgraded to a 2048 Kilobyte per second line (2 Megabyte line).
This will begin on August 24. Also, all users currently on the old 384 Kilobyte per second line will be upgraded to a 1 Megabyte per second line from October 1. The process will take a while to roll out, approximately their weeks from their respective start dates. It is definitely worth the wait, especially if you are still on 384 Kilobytes per second like me.

Finally we are moving in the right direction with internet service provision. Manelisa Mavuso, Telkom’s managing director, said it best recently: “Telkom is enhancing its value proposition to truly differentiate our broadband offerings. We are accelerating the evolution of broadband offering in the country”. Now we are talking; well done Telkom!

Solid State drive:
Every once in a while we all need to upgrade our personal computers. With technology evolving at an exponential rate, sooner or later, one component or the other becomes out of date or not compatible at all. This is becoming true for data storage. We saw the floppy disk phase out as the compact disc took over and then slowly, but surely the compact disc being phased out and replaced by flash drives.

Well, the trend is exponential and with that a new form of data storage is in town. Solid state drives are taking over. Hard disc drives are taking a beating, because despite offering larger storage they are prone to mechanical factors which boil down to being too slow. This affects responsiveness and load time from the drive, especially while running high resource applications.

Solid state drives eradicate these problems as they are solid state in format. No moving parts, but instead just flash memory chips. Now, for regular computing, day to day spread sheets and word documents your regular hard drive is fine. Solid state drives come into play when you require performance based computing, that is “GAMING”. Loading times are improved three fold. I ran ‘Battlefield’, a power hungry game off a solid state drive and the gaming experience was just so much better, faster and loading between levels was so much quicker.

Pricing has always been an issue with solid state drives; however prices of these drives are steadily coming down. The higher the storage, the more expensive it gets .However it is justifiable if you buy one purely for performance running and as a secondary device with your hard disc drive still being the primary.
- imran@48hours.co.za

Tweet