Dec 14
Reviews David
battery, bp-4l, bp4l, charging, e52, e55, E71, e72, energy, extended, li ion, lithium, mAh, mobile, n97, nokia, phone, power, replacement, storage
As mentioned previously on my blog, I use a Nokia E55, which uses Nokia’s largest battery, the BP-4L. Now, if phone batteries don’t float your boat, then stop reading now. But wait, do you have a Nokia phone? Is it perhaps the E90, E71, E52, E55, N97, E72? Then if you are using any of those, would you like even more battery life? Well in that case, maybe batteries aren’t such a boring subject!
I’ve been testing an extended version of the BP-4L, sent to me for review from MobileFun.co.uk.
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May 4
Reviews David
64gb, corsair, data, drive, flash, storage, thumb, thumb drive, usb, voyager
Well, I thought it was about time I wrote something new. Seeing as I just got my hands on a new gadget, what better time?!
I have finally got my hands on (by virtue of recently having my birthday!) something I’ve been tempted to get for a long time – this being Corsair’s 64GB Flash Voyager USB thumb drive. So far, this is the largest capacity thumb drive you can get. For me it is ideal, because as I’ve spoke of before on here, I really seek to minimise my data footprint. So while those of you out there may need Terrabytes of storage, for reasons I can only imagine; perhaps you’re archiving the entire internet; I do not need that much storage space. I often trim my files, only keeping things that are worth keeping. As to content, I’m speaking about everything: documents, photos, music, etc. My footprint constantly floats between 42 & 44 gigabytes. So a 64GB drive with no need of cables or moving parts is my perfect back up device.
Unboxing …
So, let’s have a look at the thing…
Here’s the packaging, it’s presented fairly simply. There is a box-out on the back containing all the extra paraphernalia. The box is at the top-rear while the you can see the drive is lower-centre on the front. So the packaging could have probably been made smaller. It’s the standard hard plastic pack that you have to completely wreck to extract the contents.
Speaking of paraphernalia, here is everything included in the pack:
If you click on the photo to view it on Flickr, I’ve annotated everything, but here is a short list of the contents:
- 64GB Corsair Flash Voyager
- Short USB 2.0 cable
- Lanyard
- Attachable chain with a rubber fob to slot the drive’s lid onto while in use.
- Draw-string pouch to contain everything in.
The drive is encased in rubber which gives it a definite robust feel. The drive itself is also very large for a thumb drive, here’s a picture of it in my hand so you can see:
Because of the size, the USB cable that is supplied is welcome, as it might be too much weight if, say, your laptop’s USB ports aren’t very sturdy. To see what I mean, see how far it sticks out the side of my laptop (particularly note how it dwarfs the dongle of my VX Revolution mouse):
The drive also has a blue indicator light which blinks to show when it is reading or writing (click photo to see annotations):
Usage
In everyday use, I am practising what I preach and using Truecyrpt to make sure that the contents are safe from prying eyes. However, this does slow the drive down. In my owns tests, I found that the write speed directly to the drive was almost 10MiB/sec. However, the write speed to the Truecrypt container volume drops down to 4.7MiB/sec.
To back up all of my files, I’ve cranked up the geek-o-meter somewhat by writing a batch file that uses a little known Windows command line tool called “Robocopy“.
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Jan 7
Physics David
barium titanate, batteries, breakdown voltage, capacitors, cells, charge, eestor, efficiency, electrical, electricity, electronics, energy, energy density, farad, integrated circuits, li ion, lithium ion, Physics, recharge, roadster, solid state, storage, super, tesla
Something I heard about on Security Now (Ep.117) has got me rather excited and I wanted to report about it on here.
Batteries vs Capacitors
Standard mobile phone Li Ion battery
Currently, the state of the art for energy storage in contemporary electronic devices is Lithium Ion batteries. Despite the material used (the electrolyte), batteries are all pretty much the same, in as much as a chemical reaction occurs inside the battery which drives electrons that our electronic devices can use to do work. Rechargeable batteries use a reversible reaction, so that once you do electrical work on the battery (i.e. charge it), the reaction is reversed and can begin again to power your devices.
There are a number of disadvantages to this. Firstly, because we are reversing the chemical reaction of the battery, it takes quite a while to charge them. Also, again because of relying on a chemical reaction, disposing is difficult because the contents are toxic. Also, rechargeable batteries degrade over time, so there are only so many times that you can discharge and recharge them.
Various capacitors
In electrical circuits energy can stored in components called capacitors. Capacitors aren’t used in place of batteries because the amount of energy you can store for a given size (i.e. their energy density) has been tiny. A little bit of physics for you here, which you need to know to understand the significance of what I’m leading up to telling you! The standard unit of capacitance is the Farad. Most capacitors you come across are rated at the micro Farad level (i.e. a millionth of a Farad), ranging up to a few hundred micro Farads. In my personal experience I have only seen 1 Farad capacitors for car stereo systems, although the things are massive and expensive.
A capacitor is two parallel metal plates (connected to a circuit) sandwiching a non-conducting material called a "dielectric".
Capacitors work differently to batteries. The general model of a capacitor is two parallel metal plates separated by a non-conducting material called a “dielectric“. The idea is that when you apply a voltage to a capacitor no current can flow through, but instead the electrons pile up at the cathode and create an electric field within the dielectric. Therefore, energy is stored in a capacitor as an electric field. Hence, a desirable dielectric material is one in which electric fields can easily form (which is a physical property known as permittivity). There are some limits in which you can rely on capacitors, first all there is something called the “breakdown voltage“, which is the limit of voltage you can apply to the capacitor before the current starts forcing its way through (and thus damaging) the dielectric. The amount of voltage you can safely apply to a capacitor is the limiting factor in how quickly you can charge it to its full capacitance. There is also a “leakage current“, which is the rate at which the capacitor looses energy, due to the dielectric having a very small amount of electrical conductivity.
The advantages of all this over batteries is that you can charge up a capacitor much more quickly than an electrochemical battery due to there being no chemical reaction to reverse, and there is no limit to the number of times you can charge and discharge a capacitor. The latter point is great because you have a much more durable storage system and you don’t have to worry about disposing of toxic chemical batteries.
The next generation
Now, I can hear you saying wouldn’t it great if we could have a capacitor that could store as much energy as a Lithium Ion battery, in the same size package? Well, funny you should say that, because a patent as been filed by a company called EEStor for something called a Super Capacitor that has a huge capacity, huge breakdown voltage, and twice the energy density of Lithium Ion technology.
An EeStor Cell
The patent that Eestor has filed details a device with a capacity of 31 Farads (remember before we were talking in millionths of a Farad?), with a breakdown voltage of 3,500 Volts (and it could even tolerate up to 5,000 volts). The amount energy this device can store is around the 52KWh (187 Mega Joules), with a volume of around 33 Litres, this has an energy density of around 1 Mega Joule per cubic metre, which is about double that of Lithium Ion. You could charge this thing at 3.5MV 3.5KV in around 5 minutes! While Lithium Ion batteries slowly discharge themselves at around 5% a month, according to EEStor, the super capacitors will only discharge at 0.1% per month.
The Tesla Roadster
Just to give you some sense of scale of this, consider the first commercial electric car that is currently being made, the Tesla Roadster. Currently, its Li Ion battery can be charged with 53KWh of energy in 3.5 hours at 375 volts, and has a range of 250 miles. With a super capacitor, it could be charged in 5 minutes and go twice as far.
What’s more, EEStor claim to have taken one of the super capacitor units (a small subsection of the 52KWh model), and performed one million charge/discharge cycles, then tested the unit’s performance – No degradation!
Potential uses
Of course, when we are all charging our electric cars at home in the future, we are not going to have megavolt power supplies. Although the idea is that these super capacitors could be used as energy buffers. You slowly charge up a super capacitor in your home, over night while the electricity is cheap. Then in the morning, you can zap all the power from your home capacitor into your car’s capacitor. This will really help power companies smooth out the power demands.
Energy buffers won’t just be useful for homes, think about renewable energy sources like wind power or solar. This could be an efficient way to store energy which is coming in at unpredictable times and amounts too. Come to think of it, attach solar panels to your house and they could top up your home capacitor during the day!
As I mentioned above homes won’t be equipped to charge these large capacitors in super fast time, and will instead have to slowly trickle charge on their domestic supplies. Although I imagine we’ll have the electrical equivalent of petrol stations, equipped with high voltage supplies to zap power into our car capacitors as quickly as possible.
Other interesting features of this technology is that it has been designed to be mass producible and scalable, based on integrated circuit technology. This means that the same technology can make up much smaller energy storage devices to power our mobile phones and laptops, etc. . This is where things get fun because these sorts of devices do operate on domestic voltages. Think about it we could get two to three times as much life span out of a charge on our mobile phone or laptop, but have a full recharge in 5 seconds!
Plausibility
From what I have read, there are some good reasons to think that this is not some sort of grandiose wishful thinking. Firstly, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have put venture capitol into this. This is the same company who first funded Amazon and Google. EEStor has signed a contract with Loáckheed-Martin for military and homeland security uses. Also, the material they are using as their dielectric (based on Barium Titanate) is in the same group of materials that other researchers are researching into for the same goal.
- This blog post has been based on information I have gathered from episode 117 of Security Now and the Wikipedia article for EEStor.
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