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Posts Tagged ‘review’

BD write speeds reach the double digits

Once Blu-ray burners reached 8x writes, enabling them to fill a 25GB disc with data in less than 15 minutes, speed stopped being a major argument against the technology—now it’s just price and consumer need that stand in the way of widespread adoption. Still, for what it’s worth, Blu-ray write speeds continue to improve at a steady pace, and now, a mere six months after reviewing our first 8x drive, we’ve been presented with Plextor’s 12x B940SA.

But, you’ll probably wonder, what good is a 12x drive when today’s BD-R media has a … [Read More...]

Corsair’s first chassis wins our hearts

Go big or go home. That’s a lesson Corsair apparently took to heart for its first chassis, a 24x24x9-inch full-size enclosure that rivals Cooler Master’s ATCS 840 in size. Corsair’s Obsidian 800D is all black, from its matte steel frame and side panels to its brushed-aluminum front bezel, from motherboard tray to front-panel cables, from screws to standoffs. And the goodness is more than skin deep—the 800D has everything you’d expect from a premium case: quick-swap SATA bays, thermally isolated compartments, plenty of cable-routing cutouts, and more. In fact, it’s one of the best … [Read More...]

Now with fins!

Evaluating successive generations of HP’s TouchSmart series reminds us of shopping for a new car. If you fall in love and buy this year’s model, you must never, ever visit the showroom to look at next year’s model or you’ll be hit with a bout of buyer’s remorse faster than you can say “planned obsolescence.”

We’re not suggesting that HP is intentionally designing these machines to have a shorter-than-normal useful life or that it’s been adding frivolous features to new models; it’s just that the company’s engineers keep making design improvements that are significant enough for us … [Read More...]

Too bad looks aren’t everything

Thermaltake’s first SpinQ cooler (reviewed February 2009) had style for sure—it looked like a blue-lit stack of bike gears with a fan in the middle, mounted sideways. The SpinQ VT adopts the same basic formfactor—the stack of circular aluminum fins mounted around an 8cm fan—but stands the stack upright, and uses red LEDs instead of blue. Other than that, it’s more of the same—from the variable fan speed to the so-so performance.

The SpinQ VT (we still want to pronounce it “spink”) stands 6.2 inches from base to top, and the fin stack is 4.7 … [Read More...]

If you have the need for a dedicated file server and have some old equipment laying around, turn it into a fully functional file server with FreeNAS.

FreeNAS is an embedded open source NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on FreeBSD, supporting the following protocols: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI (initiator and target) and UPnP.

It supports Software RAID (0,1,5), ZFS, disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T/email monitoring with a WEB configuration interface (from m0n0wall).

FreeNAS can be installed on Compact Flash/USB key, hard drive or booted from LiveCD.

One of the great things about FreeNAS is that is supports … [Read More...]