computer-reviews.net

Icy Dock 3 Bay Hot Swap SATA Hard Drive Enclosure

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 | Hard Drive Reviews, News | View Comments

If you are looking to expand the number of hard drives in your computer, and you are running out of space inside this could be one of the options to turn to.

With a size that is smaller than two 5.25″ drives, and the ability to hotswap up to 3 SATA drives it gives you a nice alternative to further clogging up your computer’s insides.

It fits into the double 5.25″ slots on your computer and is cooled by a fan at the back which wicks away heat into the computer, keeping the drives inside the enclosure that little bit safer from damage.

It also comes in 4 and 5 drive versions. It requires 2 molex connectors which are the older 4 pin power connectors found on optical drives and older hard drives. This is a little strange, but for the convenience, that’s what you’ll have to put up with.

Easy to install, and you can remove a faulty of broken hard drive without turning the computer off.

Read the full review at Big Bruin

Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB Hard Drive

Friday, September 22nd, 2006 | Hard Drive Reviews, News | View Comments

XYZ computing does a review of the Barracuda ES 750GB Hard drive. This drive, which is intended as an enterprise solution comes in 750GB, 500GB, 400GB and 250GB versions. The article covers the 750GB version.

The aims of enterprise storage are quite different from those in home computing. Speed is not as much of a concern in large arrays of discs, like it is in the gaming community. The focus is more on power savings, optimizing its use in large arrays and extending the life of drives.

With a 16MB of cache, NCQ and a SATA2 interface, this drive does failry well in the performance arena. It’s best points are its gigabyte for dollar values which place it well for those who are looking for a drive to provide large capacity. And the extended life won’t be looked down on either.

Read it at XYZcomputing

Western Digital Caviar 16 SE 500GB Hard Drive

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 | Hard Drive Reviews, News | View Comments

Hard Drives are quickly increasing in capacity. With the introduction of perpendicular recording technology and tighter spacing on disc platters, hard drives of up to 750GB are coming into the mainstream.

Western Digital’s main claim to fame recently has been it’s Raptor drives, with their exceptionally fast performance they have made server SCSI quality speed available in the desktop market. The introduction of the newer 150GB Raptor and the Raptor X with the window into the workings of the drive have kept consumers smiling.

NCQ, which has still to make its way into all hard drives helps to speed things up by re-ordering reads and writes into the most efficient order, making the most of every rotation of the platter.

In testing at XYZcomputing the drive was found to have pretty average performance. Compared to the Raptor line from WD it certainly did not do as well, but against the competition it did pretty well.

With half a terabyte of storage space, this drives main focus is not on being the quickest of drives, but simply being a drive with a lot of space. In that respect it does well, allowing enough storage space for things you could want today and a certain amount of assurance that you will have enough for at least a year or two to come.

LINK

Western Digital Raptor X 150GB hard drive with clear top

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 | Hard Drive Reviews, News | View Comments

The Western Digital Raptor hard drives have made quite a stir in the world of hard drives. A few years back they managed to come in as the leading contendor for the desktop market, being placed into high end machines. The original intention was for them to make grounds in the server market. The Raptor X aims squarely at the enthusiast performance market for top of the line desktop computers. The most obvious of the enthusiast features is the clear window, displaying the guts of the hard drive.

It doubles the size of its predecessor, and ups the performance. At tomshardware they take a look at just how fast this drive is and compare it to the other options available to achieve this level of performance, RAID 0. For a similar price you can get 2 ordinary drives and put them together in a RAID 0 array (where the data is striped over both drives) which also offers very solid performance.

However, this drive still manages to top those in tests. It is also a single drive, making installation easy, and because of a long 5 year warranty, you don’t have to double your worry with 2 drives that could fail.

All in all this is a wicked fast drive. If you need the best, then this is it, there is no competition. With a price tag of around $300 for the non-window version and $350 for the windowed version, it is not cheap, but certainly a worthwhile investment.

LINK

Portable hard disks on the cheap

Monday, April 3rd, 2006 | Hard Drive Reviews, News | View Comments

Portability is one of the factors that has spurred on the rush for small compact flash disk drives recently. Although they are very convenient and very reliable for the most part, they are still a little on the small side when compared to how much information hard drives can store.

One alternative is to get a portable hard drive. This is basically a hard drive built inside and enclosure that than just needs power and to be connected by USB or Firewire to a computer.

But still the problem remains. With the much higher cost of small portable drives, what do you do if you need to transport a LOT of information at the same time, but don’t want to dish out the immense amount of money needed for a 4GB flash drive.

Portable hard disks have been expensive, but there is now another option possible for those looking to get the size without the cost. The answer is hard drive enclosures. You can just get the case that you put your hard drive into and it will immediately become a massive store of data for you to use.

Setting it up is easy, just open it up connect the power plug and the IDE plug to the drive, close it up and away you go.

I would highly recommend this solution for anyone who needs to transport lots of information. If the drive you have inside is too small, the cost of upgrading the drive is not nearly as much as a memory stick upgrade.