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CrtxReavr writes "American Computer Company: "Described as a "Poker Chip Sized" solid state disk drive, the new semiconductor could be seen in service by the end of 1999 or early in the year 2000. The device can store over 90 billion characters of information..." This sounds like it's too good to be true and the article excludes a lot of important information that would be necessary for verification purposes, for what they claim is security reasons. It prolly is worth scrutinizing though. " Want some scrutiny? Conor Walsh sent us a good list of problems:

1. They can't spell 'terahertz' properly.
2. They did a really bad job with paintbrush. I have personally done better jobs. (I have a picture of Bill Clinton getting off AF-1 with an earring... I laughed my ass off when a worse one appeared in a tabloid two weeks after I made it.)
3. If it operates with almost no heat/power dissipation at 12 THz, why not raise it to 20 or so?
4. Wait... a hard drive doesn't have a frequency!
5. '...semiconducting microswitches...replacing transistors...', except that's what transistors are!
6. 'Low Power TCAPS Technology drains only 1 ma/hr during operation.' Thoroughly impossible... the ampere is not something that can be measured over time... it's an instantaneous thing. It could draw a current of one mA for an hour of operation, but it would also draw the same for a minute or a year. The term for electricity over time, in this case, would be the Couloumb. (Amps*seconds)

Viks sent in this link where you can read about what may be the most bizarre piece of hardware so far in 1998. This is a solid state storage device that plugs into a Socket 1 CPU slot on standard Pentium II mother boards. Holds 90 gigs of data, will cost under a thousand dollars. If you read the page, you will behold some absolutely amazing throughput speeds. Now the only question that remains: Is it a hoax? I won't spoil it for you by saying.