Heatsink and HD

[W1nTry]

Before I start take a look at this:



Now what do you notice about this image that is even remotely interesting?
Anything?
Come on something must be different?
nada?

Ok, well first off the heatsink has the fan mounted @ 45 degrees to combat that ever so annoying dead spot most standard heatsinks sugger from in the DEAD center of the fan. If you didn't know, yuh know now. Because the center of the fan sits directly above the core of the CPU that's usually not a good thing. There are perpendicular designs where the fan is mounted at 90 degrees to the heatsink but if you think about this, that still doesn't pass the air over the core as the design above does. You usually involve heatpipes with perpendicularly mounted fans to move the heat higher into the chassis of the heatsink for dissipation. Since this is mounted at 45 the air pretty much blows against the base of the heatsink and this the core. Most won't find that interesting but it's a logical change in heatsink design and it works well (BTW this is Abit in case you were wondering who did this).

Now to the more intersting part. If you look carefully to the right (towards the bottom) there is a blow contraption in the IDE port. If you guessed of picked it up, it's a Flash HD, 2GB to be more precise. Now think of the power, heat and NOISE you'll get rid of once devices like these really start ramping productiong. Sure they're prolly not as fast (YET) and sure the capacity is somewhat limited (at least at THAT SMALL form factor). But think of LESS CLUTTER, LESS HEAT, LESS NOISE, LESS INSTALLATION TIME. I mean if/when they get these devices up to 7200RPM 8MB Buffer SATA 300Mbps speeds and at say a nice 20-40GBs, you got urself your new HD for your OS and apps. Or think of it's applications in laptops to reduce all of the above. This is a sign of the times pplz, look to see Flash HDs become the defacto in about a year or 2. When it happens remember where you saw it first (or not first).

[Jdcrys_Shinkuu]

interesting design but how does it receive power? and good show by the abit peeps on the heatsink i say its about time some one started revolutionizing the look of the pc parts. i guess they more or less relyed on the heat gel commonly found between heatsink/processor to spread the heat away from centre of heatsink. another thing they will have to put in place as well would be the reverse ide connectors for this type of hdd if implemented in mass numbers. common connectors are female with the male pins on the rear of the hdd. be it sata or ide. now its just a matter of shrinking power supplies / optical drives and media then we can save more space. not forgetting that all these components produce heat what are the new measures besides the processor heatsink are being done.?

[TriniXaeno]

OMFG this is pure brilliance.

I could shake the hand of the techs that did this.

On a much slighter note, I like that the ram is not in the line of fire as well.

[Beomagi]

you can get flash drives for laptops in the 2.5" formfactor.

here's a 16GB flash drive
http://www.etech4sale.com/hardware/partinfo-id-152788.html

Samsung has started manufacturing 32 GB drives in this formfactor. That is not far behind the standard (talking TIME here) being just a few years behind on size.

Immediate use is for ultra portables to save on power.

[disciple]

on a related note,  i rem readin also that for new notebooks to recieve the 'windows vista premium' ready sticker, they need to have a hybrid hard drive, which has a portion of flash memory , in order to achieve ' instant booting'

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/windows-vista-premium-laptops-to-require-hybrid-hard-drives-180471.php

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/pcs/samsung-to-announce-vista-compatible-hybrid-hard-drive-172084.php

remember, they pushin for the next gen of laptops to have external lcd displays on the lid, so all tha comin into play..

[TriniXaeno]

I really love the sound of this.

Even though recently boot times have  been bearable. A typical 1gh ram, 7200 rpm hard drive windows XP machine starts up in seconds rather than minutes.

All the same, cutting that down even further to near instant would be welcome.

[Arcmanov]

I mean if/when they get these devices up to 7200RPM 8MB Buffer SATA 300Mbps speeds and at say a nice 20-40GBs, you got urself your new HD for your OS and apps.

The reduction in power consumption will be SIGNIFICANT.  Hard-drives alone account for a substantial chunk of the power output of current power supplies.
If/when this becomes standard, we may even see a reduction in power-supply sizes, which may in turn lead to very small-form-factor cases.  Small enough to put in your car maybe?

The hardware cost however might be a bit prohibitive.