Wednesday 27 February 2013

Samsung Galaxy S4: Information Imminent!


Samsung has been fairly good at keeping quiet on this one, however rumour has it that there will be an announcement on March 14th 2013 to showcase their new flagship mobile phone handset - the Galaxy S4 (S IV).

At the moment there is too much information to speculate on, however I'm certain we will see the now-standard 'upgrades' when manufacturers push their new flagships out, such as a higher res camera, higher ppi (pixel density) plus possibly larger screen and a much smoother and more enjoyable user experience in the form of a faster processor.

The Galaxy S3 base specs are as follows: Display: Super AMOLED Screen - 720 x 1280 pixels (4.8inch) at 306ppi, CPU: 1.4GHz Quad Core Cortex A9, Camera: 8MP

If we take the above and extrapolate along with taking some of the circulating rumours in, we could expect the S4 to come with a 1080p 5inch 441ppi display while sporting an Octa Core Exynos chip (with split cores) but also potential for a Snapdragon. The highest bets are currently on the 5440 Exynos Quad Core though, as it has been floating around for a few months now and is much faster than the previous chip. It seems it is all up in the air at the moment due to potential manufacturing issues. We've also heard that samsung have worked on getting the physical size of their flash memory down to enable them to produce thinner phones, this may be something we end up seeing in the new S4. The S3 sported an 8MP camera however we've heard there may be a 10MP on the upcoming S4, that's quite something for a mobile handset!

Monday 11 February 2013

X79-UD5 IRST TRIM with RAID0 SSDs in Windows 7

Hi all, just a quick update, to cut a long story short - I developed a problem on booting up since I swapped some drives around.

I swapped the 1TB out and in place put in a 500GB WD drive, setup a RAID0 with the two other 500GB drives and put the 1TB in my new server/HTPC (update to come on this) for remote backup from my main setup.

The problem was my boot times rocketed from around 15 seconds to 1 minute 20 seconds at points. It was a little frustrating especially as I'm running the two RAID0 256GB M4 SSDs. Eventually after a day of working on/reinstalling the OS/swapping drives about, I discovered it was the Marvell drivers having a paddy as, to create the RAID, I'd moved my optical drive onto the Marvell controller. On boot it was hanging for 60s just trying to initialise the DVD drive. Had to create custom event views for it to try and track it all down.

In the process, however, I discovered that on the X79-UD5's new BIOS, there is an option to switch around the Intel Controller's mode. I was presented with two options, either RSTe, or IRST. Now we all know that the new 7 series chipsets support RAID TRIM, however X79 is on the 6 series and was not supported.

Knowing that previously I'd been using RSTe (enterprise version) drivers, I had a dig around and found that if I switched the OROM (option rom) to IRST, I could install the standard version of Intel Rapid Storage Technology. I'm currently running version 11.6.0.1030, which, after a little checking, is now issuing and executing TRIM commands on the RAID0 M4s!

So - hopefully the rest of the motherboard manufacturers will, at some point, be issuing updates to allow this OROM to be switchable, especially as us enthusiasts on X79 won't like to be left out of such luxuries as TRIM, especially considering we are more likely than others to be running RAID SSDs!