talent

Awkward timing for solid-gold USB drive

Given the current economic climate, this may be the only USB drive that actually gets more valuable as time goes by. It's an 18-carat solid gold USB drive that screams, "Stock market dive, what stock market dive?"

The limited-edition drive from Super Talent Technology is a member of the Pico-C line, which is water-resistant and supports data transfer speeds up to 30MBps. The $599 bit of storage swankness comes with an 18-carat solid gold keychain and a serialized certificate of authenticity. It's wrapped in a black velvet jewelry box, and text or a logo can be … Read more

Solid-state drive gets tiny

Solid-state drives aren't always faster than regular hard drives, but they sure can be tinier.

The smallest regular hard drives are the 1.8 inchers that Toshiba has been making for ultracompact laptops. On Wednesday, Super Talent Technology announced two SSDs that come in a significantly smaller form factor: .85 inch and 1 inch.

The new SSDs use Intel Z-P140 NAND Flash-based SSD technology and employ the older parallel ATA (PATA/IDE) interface, as opposed to the current and popular SATA interface used in regular-size SSDs. Both offer rather modest read and write speeds of 40 megabytes per second … Read more

Super Talent rolls out 64GB USB drives

Super Talent Technology is out with a new family of high-capacity USB drives that offer up to 64GB of space.

For now, the new drives are possibly the largest in the community of little drives. And they have style too.

Dubbed Luxio, the drives are housed in a sleek .8 inch by 3 inch by .4 inch UV-coated ABS/PC case with chrome-plated zinc trim. They come in black, silver, and wood grain colors and in three storage sizes: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB.

All models in the Luxio family come with advanced AES-256 hardware encryption as a standard feature that … Read more

From Super Talent, Eee PC-specific solid-state drives

Super Talent Technology, a vendor that just announced high-speed and low-budget solid-state drives, introduced on Tuesday its new line of SSDs designed explicitly for Asus' Eee PCs.

The new line is available in three sizes--16GB, 20GB, and 64GB. The drives use a mini PCI-Express interface and offer rather modest throughput speeds of 40 megabytes per second in writing and 15MBps in reading.

Standard Eee PCs will generally use the 20GB version of the new SSD. Users then can choose to upgrade to 64GB or downgrade to 15GB versions. These drives can also be used in any devices that share the … Read more

Super Talent to release budget solid-state drives

Two weeks after announcing two new high-speed solid-state drives (SSD), Super Talent Technology on Tuesday announced it will release the MasterDrive LX as a budget solid-state drive later this week.

The MasterDrive LX comes in 64GB and 128GB versions and will cost about $179 and $300, respectively. Both drives are SATA-II and use NAND flash technology. They will be compatible with computers that support the ever-popular 2.5-inch SATA hard drive.

The low prices do come with a shortcoming: the throughput speed. The new MasterDrive LX drives are significantly slower than other SSDs; it's even slower than some regular … Read more

Super Talent offers two new solid-state drives

Tuesday, Super Talent Technology introduced two "dangerously fast" solid-state hard drives, the MasterDrive OX and the MasterDrive PX.

The budget MasterDrive OX uses multilevel cell NAND flash and has data speeds of up to 150MB per second in sequential read and 100B per second in sequential write, according to the company. The MasterDrive OX comes in capacities up to 128GB and has a 1-year warranty.

The higher-end MasterDrive PX, on other hand, uses single-level cell NAND flash and focuses on the reliability and endurance, rather than capacity. It, too, is supposed to have lightning-fast sequential read and write … Read more

Super Talent Techonolgoy's Pico D series: Larger capacity thumbdrive, smaller size

Super Talent Technology, a manufacturer of Flash storage and DRAM memory modules, on Wednesday announced the Pico D, the newest member of world's smallest USB thumbdrives.

Though tiny in size, measuring only 1.4-inch in length and weighing less than 0.2 ounces, the new Pico D series are shock- and water-resistant.

According to STT, these drives can transfer data at speeds up to 30 megabytes per second. Like the Cosair Flash Voyager Mini, the Pico D achieves the miniature size by using chip-on-board technology. However, the Pico D series offers storage capacity up to 8GB, twice that of … Read more

The war for talent

According to JP Rangaswami, managing director of BT Design, there is a genuine war for talent.

But the way to attract talent isn't with the most money or best perks but through openness, he said, speaking at Supernova 2008. Companies need to be open to competition, such as partnering with competitors in some areas; open to innovation in terms of creating an environment that encourages new ideas; and open to changes, Rangaswami said.

The talent pool comes from both inside and outside a firm. "Open, multisided platforms are the only way to get to the talent pool," … Read more

Lack of technical talent slowing clean-tech industry

The much-heralded clean-tech revolution needs a bigger army.

The absence of technical and managerial talent in the clean energy sector is putting a strain on the development of the industry, a survey finds.

Research firm New Energy Finance and recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles queried 75 executives in clean energy companies from around the world and found that the lack of people in the field is a problem.

Thirty-seven percent of respondents said that the recruitment issue is "very serious," and 59 percent said it was "moderately serious."

Getting appropriate people, particularly chief technology officers and … Read more