Vigile writes "When the Intel X25-M series of solid state drives hit the market last year, there was little debate that they were easily the best performing MLC (multi-level cell) offerings to date. The one area in which they blew away the competition was with write speeds — initial reviews showed consistent 80MB/s results. However, a new article over at PC Perspective that looks at Intel X25-M performance over a period of time shows that write speeds are dramatically reduced from everyday usage patterns. Average write speeds are shown to drop to half (40MB/s) or less in the worst cases, though the author does describe ways that users can recover some of the original drive speed using standard HDD testing tools." Reader MojoKid contributes related SSD news that researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a new power supply system which will significantly reduce power consumption for NAND Flash memory.

Jack Spine writes with the story that the Mozilla project "has launched 'Snowl' — an experimental messaging prototype that could allow people to collate and view messages from email, RSS, messaging, and social networks. From the article: 'Key ideas behind the project, called 'Snowl', are to enable users to prioritise messages by importance, and have a search-based interface for message retrieval, according to Mozilla developer Myk Melez. "Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions?" wrote Melez in a blog post on Wednesday. "Snowl is an experiment to answer that question." Another of the key ideas of the project is that browser functionality for navigating web content, including tabs, bookmarks, and history, be used to navigate messages.'"