computer-reviews.net

Icy Dock 3 Bay Hot Swap SATA Hard Drive Enclosure

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 | Hard Drives, News | No 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 Drives, News | No 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 Drives, News | No 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 Drives, News | No 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 Drives, News | 1 Comment

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.

Gigabyte i-RAM storage device

Thursday, March 30th, 2006 | Hard Drives, News | No Comments

Hard drives are always a bottleneck in the computer system. The mechanical nature of disks means there needs to be a physical movement of the platter inside to find the correct spot on the disk where the information you need has been stored.

Although they have gotten much faster with spindle speeds in such disks as the Western Digital Raptor reaching 10000RPM and transfer rates of up to 300MB/s available, this is still a far cry from the speeds available from main memory and the computers processor’s onboard cache.

The Gigabyte I-RAM intends to make up this area with a product that doesn’t break the bank like solid state drives do, but to offer a good balance between pricing and speed for slightly more permanent data storage than memory, but much faster speeds than those obtainable from a hard drive.

It takes 4 sticks of DIMMs to fill out the memory requirements. They are attached to the card which goes into a PCI slot. It connects to a SATA connection which is where the data is transferred. Storage is only semi-premanent, with a battery holding data if the computer is reset, but can only hold it for a few hours at the most.

The drive itself compares well to ordinary drives in tests at hothardware.com where it beat other drives hands down in all but buffered/burst speed tests.

LINK

Plextor Network Attached Storage Device

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 | Hard Drives, News | No Comments

The ability to share files is becoming more and more important. With the advent of the internet large scale file sharing became feasible. It is still not enough for smaller networks. Having a computer to act as a file server within a home network allows all the users in a household, which sometimes is a few computers, to share the files they need to.

The problem with a dedicated file server is that one computer has to be up and running all the time to ensure that the data is available to all those who need it. The Plextor NAS device gets around this problem by offering a file server setup for a home budget. It is a standalone device that will serve as a file server.

It looks similar to an external hard drive and does share a few limited features. It has 2 USB 2.0 ports at the back as well as a network connection. The software needed to run the device is located on the Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 Ultra ATA/133 hard drive inside.

It has a total of 235MB of storage space, but that is expandable by adding a USB hard drive to one of the USB ports. It is easy to setup via a local network, attached either to a computer or a hub.

LINK

Roundup of 2.5inch Laptop Hard Disks at Tomshardware

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 | Hard Drives, News | No Comments

Tomshardware have a completed a review of 8 name brand 2.5 inch laptop hard disks. Ranging in size, all the way up to 160GB there is a whole spectrum of good disks on display.

All the drives are 5400RPM drives except for one. There is an even spread of ATA100 and SATA interfaces too. Comparisson of the disks shows the implementation of new technologies like perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) which help to get more information onto a single platter.

The Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 came out as the performance king in this test, outperforming all of the other drives. The Seagate Momentus 5400.3 manages to take the crown for the most capacity, even though it can’t match the speed of the Hitachi Travelstar offerings.

Poor Samsung comes out the loser in this test.

LINK

Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA disk drive (2-Pack)

Monday, December 19th, 2005 | Hard Drives, Reviews | No Comments

Western Digital disk drives have a good reputation for reliability and performance. The Western Digital Raptor disk drives allow new levels of performance from consumer oriented hard drives. With performance that matches that of parralell SCSI at a price thats right, the Raptors have the potential to skyrocket your hard drives disk writing and reading speeds.

This pair of drives is just a price saver, they are no different from the normal 74GB Western Digital Raptor disk drive that I’ve reviewed before.

Features…

• Name: Western Digital Raptor
• Size: 74GB
• Spindle speed: 10K RPM
• Buffer memory: 8MB
• Average read seek speed: 4.9msec
• Average write seek speed: 5.9msec
• Interface: Serial ATA-150

Instead of giving another full rundown of the Western Digital Raptor hard disk drive I’ll outline what benefits you can get from a pair.

Of course there is a major expense in getting two hard drives. That is always the hardest part for me and its especially true when the price of the drives gets this high. For the same price you could get a really huge hard drive with tons of space.

With SATA you usually get the option of RAID, using RAID, two drives work together as though they are one drive. There are two in use, but data is written as though there is only one physical drive.

Two options exist for RAID at the most basic level RAID 0 and RAID 1.

RAID 0 is a striping system, where the data is spread over the two drives. This gives fantastic performance as the data can be written to whichever drive is not busy at that time. The best place for this kind of setup is those doing something like video editing where bandwidth is important. Your drive size becomes the size of the two added together. The disadvantage of this setup is that there is not fault tolerance, so if one drive fails you lose all your data.

RAID 1 is a mirroring system. Both drive end up with identical data, so if one of them fails you do not lose all your data. It doesn’t provide any speed benefits over a single drive. You also only get the size of a single drive, so 2 74GB drives will yield 74GB. Best for data you can’t afford to lose.

These are the only two options available for 2 disks, you need 4 for other RAID options which provide a mix of performance and security but with the cost of 4 drives.

So if you want a performance increase with good security go for RAID 1, which is what I use. But if speed is essential, awesome performance can be had with the RAID 0 setup.

I highly recommend these drives for those who are looking for something to boost their already souped up computer.

Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB 7200RPM SATA2 Hard Drive

Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 | Hard Drives, Reviews | No Comments

The Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 is just a souped up version of the its little brother, the 7K250. Unlike the slower version this one only comes in 160GB and 250GB versions.

It’s faster speed comes from the fact that there are only two platters inside, each packed with 130GB of space instead of 90GB. This compactness allows quicker access to the information on the disk.

Features at a glance…

• SATA2
• 7200RPM
• Faster data access than predecessor
• 8MB buffer

As with other Hitachi drives it comes with SATA2. Although it still uses less bandwidth than SATA its still a nice thing to add in.

It doesn’t however support Native Command Queuing. NCQ speeds up data transfer by intelligently reordering reads and writes so as to minimize drive spin time. The lag in the disk spinning to the right spot accounts for much of the lag in hard drives.

There is an UltraATA/133 version of this drive that should deliver similar performance if you don’t need or want SATA.

In terms of performance this drive is slightly faster than the rest of the Hitachi drives.

Write and Read transfer rates are similar with both coming in at an average 52MB/s. Interface bandwidth gets a very high score of around 118MB/s.

A good performer, which should be fine for a few years because of its decent size.