PC Mechanic, New Article

Posted: 22 Apr 2011 03:00 AM PDT

The system requirements for Windows 7 state that you need a minimum 16 GB available hard drive space to run the OS properly. Remember that figure as you read through this.

Solid State Disk or SSD for short is fast because there’s far less wait time compared to HDD. This is because SSD has no moving parts while HDD does.

If I were in the market to build a badass gaming rig, I’d seriously consider an SSD/HDD dual-drive setup. The SSD would be SATA 6Gb/sec connected (of course) so I could get the full 355MB/sec read speed. For the secondary HDD I’d go with at least a 1TB drive for whatever other stuff I’d want to store there (including the Windows user folders themselves).

On a cursory inspection of how much storage would really be needed for the host drive, I found that I could ‘get away’ with 128GB if I had to. My Windows folder in my Win7 64-bit installation is just a tick over 20GB, and the Program Files and Program Files (x86) folders put together are just under 30GB – and I have a lot of programs installed including several big games.

A 128GB host drive is a do-able thing. Not comfortable, but do-able. And the price point is somewhat reasonable.

The 128GB SSD with the SATA 6Gb/sec and 355MB/sec read speed presently has a price tag of around $250. Ordinarily this would put me off something awful, however it’s offset by the fact big-storage HDDs are ridiculously cheap, as in $80 per 2TB cheap.

My only issue personally is that I don’t feel comfortable with a primary host drive of only 128GB. Were it 256GB, yes that suit – but you’ll have to fork over a whopping $450 for a 256GB SSD at present.

Is SSD a good deal yet? Nope. But it’s getting there. When it comes down to the dollar-per-GB range, that will probably be the point where I make the switch – at least for the host drive.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Is An SSD A Good Deal Yet?

How To Convert Other Video Formats To WebM Easily [Video]

Posted: 21 Apr 2011 07:00 AM PDT

WebM is a new video format that has been rumored heavily to be the next generation of internet video. At present, YouTube is converting its entire catalog of user content (starting with more popular videos first) to the WebM format.

Fortunately there’s a really easy way in Windows to convert existing popular formats (like WMV) to WebM, and that’s by using the free Miro Video Converter utility. All this utility does is automate FFMPEG commands. What this means is that if you’re on a Mac or using Linux, you can do the same job by using FFMPEG direct from the command line. Miro’s converter utility is designed to be ridiculously easy to use, and yes it works.

The video below is one that I did convert from WMV to WebM and then posted to YouTube. Everything worked out great. See video below to see how it all works.