Now that’s a solid state offer, if ever I saw one!
From now until 8th October, 2018, Elesar Ltd‘s Titanium motherboard is available to buy with a jolly useful optional extra – a SanDisk 128GB solid state drive (SSD), pre-loaded with a standard RISC OS 5 disc image.
The company doesn’t sell the motherboard as part of a computer system, and instead as a single component. To have a Titanium-based computer, therefore, you need to either purchase a complete system from either R-Comp or CJE Micro’s, or buy the board from Elesar and be prepared to source the other components necessary and built that system yourself.
Non-volatile storage is an important part in any computer system, and this offer means it’s taken care of from the outset. In addition, the fact that the RISC OS 5 disc image is set up on the SSD takes away another important step of setting up your home-built Titanium-based computer.
Being a solid state drive, the bundled device offers a good turn of speed compared with traditional hard drives (that do actually turn – or rather spin). Elesar reports that loading a sample 50MB file into RAM via a BASIC program achieves a sustained 118MB/s – indicating that large data sets will be handled without breaking a sweat, as will sets consisting of lots of smaller files, such as a web browser’s cache.
The bundle consists of the Titanium motherboard, with its 1.5GHz Cortex-A15 processor and 2GB RAM, the SSD featuring the RISC OS 5 disc image (the OS itself is included on the on-board boot flash), and the printed Quick Start Guide, all for £498 including VAT, but excluding postage – that’s the same price as the motherboard would ordinarily cost without the drive.
If you already have a suitable SSD, however, Elesar’s existing User Guide bundle might be a better option. For the same price, this will bag you the Titanium motherboard and the RISC OS User Guide, a hefty tome brought up to date from the old Acorn version (dating back to 1996) earlier this year.
