Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
It’s been almost two and a half years since my post about hidden gems within the multitude of (often crappy) products found in CD-R King. Since that post, I’ve found a couple of new interesting finds worth a blog post.
No, there won’t be any obvious things here (e.g. the laptop, netbook, tablet, etc). I prefer not-so-obvious items that are mostly relevant to my interests.
Continue reading “Notable CD-R King Items Holidays 2011 Edition”
It’s no secret that I have a guilty pleasure of going to CD-R King to look for decent stuff in their inventory. And I do find some nice stuff once in a while, for example, I only recently found out that they sell digital scales that allow zero resetting, an invaluable tool in the kitchen especially when baking. The PhP 380 – 580 price range is just too low when compared to the scales you’ll find in stores like Gourdo’s which sell them from PhP 1,500 to 3,000.
Anyway, I’m just here to point out that CD-R King has a new 64GB SSD in their inventory. At PhP 3,990, it’s cheaper than the one I have on my rig right now, but based on reviews it’s supposed to be crappier.
Still, there are worse ways to shell out P4k (like, say, attending a cloud computing conference when you’ve already been using it for years) so slapping one on your on-the-go workhorse laptop isn’t that bad of an idea.
Last year, I bought two really cheap SSDs from the unlikeliest of sources: CD-R King.
Everything about it was just screaming BAD IDEA. Someone over at HardOCP’s forum even suggested the drives will have “gone to shit” in just 4 months.
Let’s see how much the performance has degraded a year later:
As expected, the drive has degraded a bit, its performance half of what it was last year. For reference, here’s the HD Tune performance just after I first installed them (with a brand new OS and all) last year:
A 50% drop in performance might be disappointing, but when you take into account the expected performance of top non-SSD hard drives, it’s still pretty impressive. Here’s the graph of the comparison drive last year (Western Digital 10K RPM Raptor):
So no, performance still hasn’t gone to shit yet.
(note, this was written in January 2010. If you’re looking for cheap SSDs, just go directly to a store like PCHub and get a 128GB drive for around ~3.5k.)
For some odd reason, I missed this little gem in last year’s Notable CD-R King Items.
It’s a 64GB solid-state drive for only PhP 5,800.
Everyone has their own CD-R King horror stories: the long lines, the unfriendly attendants, and crappy items that go boom after a week. But with so many items in their catalog, there’s got to be some hidden gems in there.
So to round out my series on the ZyXEL router hidden among the hundreds of CD-R King merchandise, I’ll be pointing out other items that I consider to be notable in their catalog.