My deal of the day today is this 8Gb Sandisk USB Flash drive.

This drive usually sells for over $60 (which is pretty steep, but it’s a Sandisk). Buy.com has it on sale today for just $29.99 with free shipping. It’s currently not in stock, but should be ready to ship within a week or 2.

If you are a new Google Checkout user, you can score an extra $10 off this drive, brining the price down to just $19.99!

Product link: Buy.com

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If you’ve been keeping up with the news, then you’ll have seen that a recent court ruling has decided that it is no longer required to have "probable cause" to check the contents of your laptop. When you pass customs and immigration upon entering the USA they are free to inspect anything/everything on your machine, including any confidential files.

If you think it doesn’t impact you, then check out this discussion. In the coming days I’ll put together an article suggesting some ways you can keep your files safe, and possibly even prevent Customs from seizing your laptop.

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I’m not sure whether this is because of new technology, poor quality control or if user expectations are set too high; but apparently the return rate of machines with an SSD drive is an alarming 20%-30%. Normal (spinning) drives only see a 1%-2% return rate.

Notebooks with flash-based hard drives cost a lot and, according to managing partner Avi Cohen at Avian Securities, they don’t work very well either.

A large computer manufacturer is getting around 20 percent to 30 percent of the flash-based notebooks it is shipping sent back because of failure rates and performance that simply isn’t meeting customer expectations, the firm stated in a report on Monday. Avian gathered this information on a recent swing through Asia.

It’s no secret that performance on current SSD drives is not what some users expect, especially when dealing with small files (like email). But return rates like that put it up there with the Xbox360 in terms of reliability. Not a good thing.

Source: Crave

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