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PRODUCT REVIEWS
May 6, 2009

It's here.  The long-awaited Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition.  3.2GHz of pure goodness!


We also look at the Asus M4A79T Deluxe.  Best AM3 board?  Maybe...



PRODUCT REVIEWS
May 5, 2009

SUPER SPRING 2009 HDD EXTRAVAGANZA!

Seagate Savvio 15K.2 147GB SAS

Seagate Savvio 10K.3 300GB SAS

Seagate Constellation 500GB SATA

Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B SATA

Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 SATA

Western Digital Green Power WD20EADS 2TB SATA

Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB SATA


PRODUCT REVIEW
April 30, 2009

COOLIT SYSTEMS DOMINO ALC
Easy and effective watercooling?


PRODUCT REVIEW
April 21, 2009

TWO NEW MUST-HAVES FOR THE MOBILE WARRIOR!
Samsung's SE-S084B DVD burner and the Wilson Electronics MobilePro Amplifier kit!


PRODUCT REVIEW
March 17, 2009

Samsung S1 - 120GB portable bus-powered USB 2.0 HDD
Beautifully small, but how does it perform?


HOW-TO ARTICLE
March 1, 2009
 

Does your RPTV have broken deflection ICs (STK392-110)?
Here's how we repaired a Toshiba 53HX71!



PRODUCT REVIEW
February 4, 2009

Logitech and Skype team up to give us FREE high-quality Video conferencing! 
Are the webcams worth it?  Click here to find out!


PRESS RELEASE
February 3, 2009

SEAGATE® INTRODUCES CONSTELLATION™: ALL-STAR ENTERPRISE HARD DRIVES WITH THE WORLD’S HIGHEST CAPACITY AND POWER EFFICIENCY

The Constellation family includes 2.5-inch nearline hard drive with lowest enterprise power consumption and record-setting 3.5-inch 7200-rpm 2TB hard drive for nearline Tier 2 enterprise applications

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. — February 2, 2009 — Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) today introduced its Constellation™ family of new enterprise storage solutions for Tier 2 nearline storage applications. The two new drive models, the 2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drives, include a combination of features that enable high capacities, increased power efficiency, enterprise-class reliability, and data security. Both drives also include PowerChoice™ from Seagate, which decreases power consumption by up to 54% for record power savings in enterprise environments.

“The need for greater storage capacity will continue to expand in multiple directions and dimensions, but there will be an increasing scrutiny of all storage system purchases, with an eye to decreasing power consumption, footprint, and cost per GB in unprecedented ways,” said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner. “Performance will not be ignored, but a flexible balance of capacity, cost per GB, power and speed will become more crucial in fulfilling end-user storage demands at varied price points.”

Constellation
The Constellation 2.5-inch hard drive is offered in capacities of 160GB and 500GB with both 3 Gbps SATA and new SAS 2.0 interface running at 6Gb/s speeds. As the first SAS 2.0 nearline drive, the Constellation hard drive enables larger external storage topologies, 100% faster data throughput and higher signal strength over greater distances – dramatically increasing storage scalability. The Constellation family will begin shipping this quarter.

“Dell recognizes that increased capacity and high-reliability are key to enabling further adoption of small form factor storage within the enterprise. With new capacities, small form factor drives afford customers performance and power gains within the same rack space,” said Praveen Asthana, director of Dell Storage.
“As an industry-leader in storage, Dell is pleased to partner with Seagate and be one of the first companies to offer the Constellation family of drives to our customers.”

Constellation ES
The 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drive will be available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities, and with an enterprise-class SAS interface as well as a SATA version, and provides best-in-class capacity and performance. As the world’s only 7200-rpm 3.5-inch hard drive providing up to 2TB of storage, the record-setting capacity of Constellation ES hard drives are ideal for 3.5-inch based external storage architectures. With Constellation ES hard drives, customers don’t have to sacrifice performance in order to gain the highest capacities. The Constellation ES hard drive will ship in calendar Q3.

“Xyratex continues to work closely with Seagate to advance storage system innovation to meet both the performance and capacity-based market requirements,” said Todd Gresham, executive vice president and general manager of the Networked Storage Solutions Division for Xyratex. The new Constellation family of products compliments Xyratex’s philosophy of delivering cost-effective enterprise-class, energy efficient storage solutions that help provide our customers the long-term investment protection they demand.”

With Seagate’s innovative PowerChoice technology, both Constellation hard drive models deliver the highest power-reduction savings ever offered in an enterprise-class HDD, and provide flexible, user-manageable options to deliver power savings without sacrificing performance, data integrity, or reliability. In addition, the Constellation family of drives are backed with field-proven, enterprise-grade reliability and rated at a full 1.2 million hours MTBF.

Delivering on Seagate’s commitment to add security features throughout its product portfolio, the Constellation family of drives are offered with optional self-encrypting drive (SED) technology and provide government-grade data security through the drive’s life cycle. SED technology makes drive retirement and disposal easy by eliminating the need for the numerous manual processes involved which are often incomplete, complex, expensive, or prone to error. For critical information that must remain secure, and because all systems are eventually retired, whether being relocated, re-purposed, or disposed of, the information on a Constellation SED hard drive remains AES-safe.

Seagate Unified Storage™ architecture delivers long-term business sustainability
Historically, the variety of drive interfaces, form factors and now, security solutions, can add complexity and increase costs for both IT professionals and OEMs. Making the wrong choice today creates storage
islands in the data center with no easy path for upgrades – further complicating an already complex environment. The Seagate Unified Storage architecture converges best-of-breed technologies (Serial
Attached SCSI, Small Form Factor and Self-Encrypting Drives) into a foundation for powerful yet simple storage that boosts business and operational efficiency while reducing cost and complexity.

The Seagate Unified Storage architecture delivers a storage foundation for companies that are proactively ensuring the long-term sustainability of their business through best-in-class IT practices. Companies will avoid the risk of impacting their own product quality, competitiveness, or profitability when their storage system infrastructure and data center footprint is optimized across power, cooling and performance density. Because the role of small form factor drives are important to the long-term efficiency and sustainability of any data center enterprise, Seagate will be extending this component into all tiers of its Unified Storage architecture in the future.

“With tightening IT budgets, Seagate is committed to delivering enterprise-class nearline storage solutions that ensure business sustainability by optimizing resources, reducing environment, energy or social impact and satisfying customer requirements without compromising performance,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president, Seagate Core Marketing and Strategy. “These new Constellation HDDs provide business continuity in the data center by offering the highest capacities, the lowest power, and the latest in enterprise-class data integrity with SAS 2.0 and AES government-grade encryption.”

For more information about the Constellation family of drives, in addition to Seagate’s other enterprise storage solutions, visit www.seagate.com.

About Seagate
Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of hard disk drives and storage solutions, providing products for a wide-range of applications, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Branded Solutions. Seagate’s business model leverages technology leadership and world-class manufacturing to deliver industry-leading innovation and quality to its global customers, with the goal of being the time-to-market leader in all markets in which it participates. The company is committed to providing award-winning products, customer support and reliability to meet the world’s growing demand for information storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at http://www.seagate.com.
 

Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Wave logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. Constellation, PowerChoice and Unified Storage are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or one of its affiliated companies in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. When referring to hard drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes. Your computer’s operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions, and thus will not be available for data storage. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications.

# # #


PRESS RELEASE
February 3, 2009

WD® LAUNCHES INDUSTRY'S FIRST 2 TB HARD DRIVES WD's Eco-friendly, Cool and Quiet, WD Caviar® Green™ Drive Marks the Largest Capacity Hard Drive in the Industry

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Jan. 27, 2009 - WD (NYSE: WDC) today announced the first 2 terabyte (TB) hard drive - the world's highest capacity drive and the latest addition to WD's popular, environmentally friendly, cool and quiet, WD® Caviar® Green™ hard drive family. This new 3.5-inch platform is based on WD's industry-leading 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) with 32 MB cache, producing drives with capacities of up to 2 TB.

"While some in the industry wondered if the end consumer would buy a 1 TB drive, already some 10 percent of 3.5-inch hard drive sales are at the 1 TB level or higher, serving demand from video applications and expanding consumer media libraries," said Mark Geenen, President of Trend Focus. "The 2 TB hard drives will continue to satisfy end user's insatiable desire to store more data on ever larger hard drives."

WD Caviar Green is one of the most successful product lines in the company's recent history with its third-generation GreenPower™ technology, now providing 2 TB of proven reliable storage for today's high-resolution files and graphics. WD Caviar Green drives are designed for use in USB/FireWire®/eSATA external hard drives, desktop computers, workstations, and desktop RAID environments.

"Saving power without sacrificing storage capacity is what consumers want, and what many businesses are requiring today. With the launch of the new WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drive, customers receive the additional capacities needed to operate today's highly advanced programs and high-resolution digital files while using less power than typical drives with similar performance and capacities," said Jim Morris, WD senior vice president and general manager of client systems.

Rock Solid Mechanical Architecture, Cool, Quiet Hard Drives A number of advanced technologies enable the speed, capacity and performance of WD's Caviar Green 1.5 TB and 2 TB hard drives. Those include: StableTrac™, which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations1; IntelliPower™, which fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance; IntelliSeek™, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration; and NoTouch™ ramp load technology, which is designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection while in transit.

Availability and Pricing The WD Caviar Green 2 TB is available at select resellers and distributors. MSRP for the WD Caviar Green 2 TB hard drives (model WD20EADS) is $299.00 USD. More information about WD Caviar Green desktop drives may be found on the company's Web site at http://wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=576

About WD WD, one of the storage industry's pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company produces reliable, high-performance hard drives that keep users' data accessible and secure from loss. WD applies its storage expertise to consumer products for external, portable and shared storage applications. WD was founded in 1970. The company's storage products are marketed to leading systems manufacturers, selected resellers and retailers under the Western Digital® and WD brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company's Web site (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

1 The StableTrac feature is only included on the 2 TB model.

###

Western Digital, WD, the WD logo and WD Caviar are registered trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. in the US and other countries; Green, IntelliPower, IntelliSeek, NoTouch, StableTrac, and GreenPower are trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks herein are property of their respective owner. As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. As used for buffer or cache, one megabyte (MB) = 1,048,576 bytes.

 


REVIEWS
December 31, 2008

Inexpensive, easy, and fun: Playstation 2 Mods without soldering!


 


REVIEWS
December 30, 2008

GOODBYE 2008!

For 2008, we've put together our choices for a Home Server and HTPC hardware!

Quiet, fast, HD recording and playback, digital cable-box capture over 1394, network QAM tuners, and 21 HDDs!


REVIEWS
December 16, 2008

OUR MOBILE WARRIOR HOLIDAY SHOPPING GUIDE IS COMPLETE!

Check out our picks for the ultimate in mobile computing experience!


REVIEWS
December 11, 2008

Could this be the 500GB 2.5" drive to dominate all 500GB 2.5" drives?

Find out and read our WD Scorpio Blue 500GB (WD5000BEVT) Review!


REVIEWS
November 11, 2008

 

5x SUPER 2.5" HARD DRIVE ROUNDUP!

Hitachi's 7K200, 7K320, and 5K500 compete with
Samsung's slender HM500LI and WD's HOT Scorpio Black 320GB!!!
 

 

REVIEWS
September 16, 2008

We look at THREE i5400 Seaburg  motherboards

from ASUS, SUPERMICRO, and TYAN

with Intel's 5450 (3.0/1333) and 5482 (3.2/1600) Harpertowns

 

BLOG ENTRIES AND UPDATES
August 29, 2008

 

  • Just how fast is AMD's latest and greatest Phenom 9950?  Amazingly fast, and quite a heat producer too!


 

PRODUCT REVIEW
August 1, 2008


REVIEW:  Even more speed today - meet the new 1TB boss!


 

PRODUCT REVIEW
July 31, 2008
 


REVIEW: Adaptec's ASR-51245 + 2x Seagate's NEW Cheetah 15k.6 450GB SAS!

OMG that's FAAAST!


 

BLOG ENTRIES AND PRODUCT REVIEW
June 30, 2008
 


REVIEW: 4x Fujitsu MBA3300RC + Promise EX4650 - Good enough for you?


  • The 2008 version of the High-Def Home Theater server is in progress now.  Expect a 4U, 16TB or bigger, power-efficient system, running on WinXP 32 with SageTV!

  • I had to drop T-Mobile in favor of Verizon.  EV-DO speeds are around 550kbps down, 110kbps up.  Not bad, just like 2001 DSL speeds!  The phones they have kinda suck compared to WM6.0 units I'd rather use, so I opted for the LG Voyager.

  • We're looking at an eeePC vs ultraportable article within the summer, hopefully.  I like the eeePC with the 8.9" LCD, and compare that against a Penryn-based dual-core 12.1" notebook or smaller. 


 

BLOG ARTICLE
June 8, 2008
 


Capturing Digital Cable Video Content

Got Digital Cable?  If you do, maybe you can save those shows on your HTPC!

 

PRODUCT REVIEW
May 27, 2008
 


PROMISE SUPERTRAK EX4650

and

4x WESTERN DIGITAL RE2-GP 1TB

Less Power?  Is it noisy?  Performance worth the cost?  You'll be surprised!


 


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