Almost all of the SSDs on the market today are packed inside small 2.5" cases. That is all fine and good if you are building up a mobile machine or a SFF rig, but if you want more performance out of a desktop PC with lots of open 3.5" bays, 2.5" SSDs are not ideal. RunCore has launched a new and very awesome SSD that uses a 3.5" form factor. The reason for the 3.5" size is more space for storage.

The new SSD packs in a full terabyte of storage capacity. RunCore says that the small 2.5" SSD simply is too small to put in enough flash storage for all the storage that your average user needs on a desktop. I can attest that tiny 60GB or smaller SSDs are more trouble than they are worth for many computer enthusiasts.

The massive 1TB SSD uses the SATA III 6Gb port for connectivity and is blazing fast. The SSD promises performance of over 500MB/s. The large number of flash chips inside the SSD are divided in two groups. That means that inside the single enclosure is a pair of SSDs and each has its own Sandforce 1200 controller. The dual SSDs inside mean that you can switch the SSD to RAID support for data mirroring. The read performance of each SSD is 285MB/s and write is 275MB/s. Pricing and availability are unknown, but this thing will be crazy expensive. I expect it to be well into the thousand dollar range or higher.

We all know that the Intel Sandy Bridge processors are on the horizon and with the parts will come the need for a new mainboard if you plan to upgrade. NVIDIA has issued a press release today that notes most major mainboard makers have licensed its SLI technology to put into their Sandy Bridge boards. The companies include Intel, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, and EVGA.

The SLI tech is licensed to use on the SLI-certified P67 mainboards. "The combined processing prowess of Sandy Bridge and NVIDIA SLI technology will provide consumers with the building blocks for the ultimate gaming PC platform," said Joel Christensen, General Manager of Intel Client Board Division at Intel Corporation. "Both NVIDIA and Intel continue to share a combined passion for furthering the PC as the definitive platform for gaming, and this combination will surely be attractive to anyone building or purchasing a brand new PC in 2011."

Some of the boards will also support 3-way SLI. Naturally the SLI supporting boards will work with any NVIDIA GPUs include the new GTX 580 and GTX 570 boards. That leak about the dual GPU high-end video card a while back would be great in SLI with one of the new processors and mainboards.

Growing up everyone I knew had one of the Polaroid instant cameras. My parents have photo albums of my youth that are packed with photos that came shooting out of the font of one of those instant cameras. My grandmother was always walking around shooting photos with the camera. The sound will forever be associated with Christmas for me and my cousins and I would fight over who got to shake the pic until it developed.

I was among the many who were disappointed when the cameras were discontinued. If you have fond memories of the camera, you can get a very limited edition run of refurbished units right now that work and everything. The cameras come from Photojojo and have been polished to look and work just as if they were new.

My mom had one of those rainbow ones when I was a kid and later bought the block one with the pop up flash. If you have these old cameras sitting around, you could make some serious Christmas cash. Photojojo is selling the 660 Sun for $200 and it comes with a pack of film too. When you need more film, you can get new packs of film for $20 to $23 with eight exposures.

Tron was the coolest film ever when I was a kid and the movie is still really cool. I spent many a Saturday in the arcade in the mall playing the Tron video game when I was a kid. I loved the light cycle game and the one where the face was inside all the swirling tiles you had to destroy. I recall there were several different games you could play on the arcade game, but I forget what the others were now. Disney Interactive Studios has announced a new Tron: Evolution video game to go with the flick launching this month.

The game is on every game console and on Windows as well. Not surprisingly considering it's based on what will be one of the biggest flicks of the year, the title is offered in a few versions for other game systems. On the Xbox 360 and PS3, it will sell for $59.99, which is the typical price of a new game. The Wii Version is $49.99 and is called Tron: Evolution - Battle Grids. The DS and PSP versions are $39.99 and the Windows game is $29.99.

The most awesome version of the game will be on the Xbox and PS3 with a Collector's Edition of the game for $129.99. In addition to the game the collector's also get an illuminated light cycle, protective case, and vouchers for free tickets to the flick. I totally want that collector's edition of the game.

The Apple iPad is selling in droves and is taking a bunch of sales away from the computer market. The wild popularity of the tablet has meant that for a while it was very hard to find. Now that production has ramped up the iPad is easy to find in all sorts of locations. The tablet is selling very well and as Apple fans are apt to do, new rumors are already swirling about the next installment of the iPad dubbed the iPad 2.

According to the rumor, the iPad 2 will be landing at the end of February of 2011. The rumor also claims that Foxconn will have in the area of 400,000 to 600,000 iPad 2 units ready to ship at that time. To add a rumor within a rumor the source cited by Redmond Pie claims that the iPad 2 was supposed to land in January, but firmware testing has pushed the launch to February.

The iPad 2 is expected to get some of the cool new features of the iPhone 4 like a front facing camera for FaceTime, a new Retina display, and a gyroscope. That display is the only thing that will make me want to upgrade to a newer iPad. The retina display on my iPhone 4 is so much better than the screen on my 3GS was. Other rumors about the next iPad suggest that Qualcomm is providing the baseband chips for the device.

Sharkoon reminds me a lot of Brando with all sorts of USB offerings. Rather than weird USB gadgets, Sharkoon tends to concentrate on making some really cool docking station that connect to your Pc via USB and allow you to use your old desktop and laptop hard drives as external storage. The docking stations are a great way to be able to use your old HDDs without having to buy up a bunch of external enclosures.

Sharkoon has announced a redesign of its QuickPort HDD docking station called the SATA QuickPort XT. The redesign offers the dock for the first time with black or white colors and you can get the thing in USB 3.0 as well. The drive also gains a cool backup feature that can backup your machine with the touch of a button.

The single click backup feature is software driven and included on a CD and must be installed to a Windows XP, Vista or 7 computers. The front of the docking station has a LED that glows when the drive is active. The dock ships with a power supply and has an on/off switch as well. The are now five versions of docking station with a USB2.0/eSATA version, USB 3.0 kit that also includes a USB 3.0 host card that fits into a PCIe slot.

If you are a fan of AMD CPUs, today is a good day for you. The new high-end CPU from AMD launched today and all the reviews have landed. The CPU is called the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T and the thing is a beast. The new processor is a 6-core unit that has the same TDP as the previous high-end part of 125W. However, the new 1100T processor has a 100MHz faster clock speed at 3.3GHz with Turbo Frequency of up to 3.7GHz.

If you are the sort of geek that likes to buy the CPU being replaced at a lower price, the former king X6 1090T is still being sold at about £200 (about $315). The price of the new processor is about £225 (about $354). The new 1100T is multiplier unlocked as all of the AMD Black Edition parts have historically been.

If you are hot for one of the new AMD parts, check out the reviews of the new processor around the web at the links below:

Our lovely and friendly GIGABYTE Tech Support forum admin Lsdmeasap has been at it again and has managed to achieve something pretty special.

Using a set of Mushkin Radioactive DDR3-2000 3 x 2GB memory modules and a GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD6 motherboard, he has been able to push the RAM well above spec and hit the mighty 3000MHz DDR zone. Actually, the exact speed he was able to reach was 3025.80MHz at timings of a pretty decent 9-12-9-31 considering the extreme memory speed.

Using a RAM cooling block that is usually designed for water cooling, Lsdmeasap instead used some dry ice and sent the memory down to a chilly minus 41 degrees Celsius. You can see the results and all the pictures over at this forum thread. Nice work again Lsdmeasap!

Continuing with the constant gusher of Google news today brings us Google Maps for Mobile 5. It was previewed by Andy Rubin once again on the stage of D: Dive Into Mobile - previewed on the prototype Motorola Honeycomb tablet !

The biggest change of Google Maps for Mobile 5 is the dynamic map drawing - vectors instead of flat images that scale much better and will show the buildings fleshed out for over 100 cities.

More additions include the ability to use two fingers to tilt and rotate around the map (in addition to pinch-to-zoom), storage of the vectors are much smaller than the current images which leads to offline caching. Maps will now be kept on a file of the locations that you go to and search the most often - from there it'll be able to reroute while offline in Navigation.

NVIDIA has lost their Quadro and Tesla manager to AMD. The story of Rob MacDonald begins with how he began with taking over NVIDIA's UK graphics sales operation in 2002 and shortly after was given control of graphic card sales into the Nordic region (Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway).

Rob was then promoted into Quadro sales and he has been expanding in that role ever since. Why is this news significant you ask? Professional products are the cash cow of the graphics industry...

Rob was 'the man' for NVIDIA as he controlled key accounts across UK, France, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, India and the Middle East countries. That's all you say? Well, the guy would know exactly which customers purchase what and where demand is and also, is not.