WESTERN DIGITAL MY BOOK MIRROR EDITION

Double Protection

External drive backups are all about securing the data on your PC. Nothing exemplifies this more than the Western Digital My Book. The Mirror Edition links two identical 3.5-inch 1-terabyte hard drives together to give you 1TB of RAID 1 (mirrored) storage (good for over 200 DVD movies or roughly two hundred thousand digital photos), which will be protected from the failure of a single hard drive.

The My Book Mirror Edition is a squat 6.75-by-4-by-6-inch (HWD) black box with ventilation holes punched into three of its sides. On the back you'll find the power button, a jack for the power adapter, and a mini USB port. In front is a vertical line of blue LEDs forming the activity/capacity indicator. The system is marketed as a 2TB drive because there are physically two drives, each 1TB, but you get that total capacity only if you go into the included WD RAID Manager and reset the drives to RAID 0.
The drive is a decent performer, especially considering that it copies everything twice. The My Book took 57 seconds to copy our standard 1.2GB test folder via Windows drag-and-drop and a pokey 3 hours 10 minutes via WD's Anywhere Backup utility. But that was just for the first backup; subsequent backups were almost instantaneous. Anywhere Backup isn't suited to full disaster-recovery backups. but the software will back up your data and media files.



The drive comes with WD Drive Manager, WD RAID Manager, and trial subscriptions to MioNet for online remote access and Memeo AutoSync for syncing folders between muItiple PCs. And with Gree n-Power drives, this unit is quiet and energy efficient. Any digital media enthusiast or business owner definitely needs one of these.—Joel Santo Domingo

PC Magazine January 2009

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Corsair Flash Voyager 64GB

If there's one tech company that rarely makes a misstep, it's Corsair. From cooled memory to stalwart power supplies to big, fast USB drives, the well-regarded company's reputation is one of innovation and quality.

Capacities double in the flash world, and hence this latest Flash Voyager packs twice as much storage space as its 32GB predecessor. Having reviewed a 16MB Q drive from ei, one of the first USB flash drives, we're still somewhat impressed that we're talking about double-digit gigabytes in the same form factor. Eight years ago, 64MB cost $200. Today, you can get 1,000 times the capacity for just $50 more.

Corsair calls the bootable Flash Voyager shockproof, thanks in large part to its fully rubber sheath. Even the cap is rubber, although its ridged opening fits the drive's USB connector precisely enough to eliminate worries about it slipping off. Goodies include a tradeshow-caliber lanyard with a chromed thumb clip, a USB extension cable, and a branded drawstring bag. There's also a rubber cap retainer on a chain. The lanyard atachment point is rubber, too, but it seems tough enough.

The drive comes preformatted with FAT32, but that's easy enough to rectify. Our drive did't come with any of the bundled software the press release mentioned. Still, its 10-year warranty is attractive.

It took 3;13 (min:sec; 0.52MBps) to copy 100MB to the Flash Voyager with write caching enabled, but then Vista seems to make even a quad-core with VelociRaptop ridiculously slow at file transfers. The Corsair did read the test folder back in a mere 11 seconds, or at 9.1MBps.

If you're into carrying around your own bootable desktop and apps, but you're frustrated by the limitations of a smaller drive, a 64GB Flash Voyager can let you have your cake and eat it, too.

by Marty Sems
www.corsairmicro.com



Computer Power User January 2009

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Corsair Flash Voyager 64GB

If there's one tech company that rarely makes a misstep, it's Corsair. From cooled memory to stalwart power supplies to big, fast USB drives, the well-regarded company's reputation is one of innovation and quality.

Capacities double in the flash world, and hence this latest Flash Voyager packs twice as much storage space as its 32GB predecessor. Having reviewed a 16MB Q drive from ei, one of the first USB flash drives, we're still somewhat impressed that we're talking about double-digit gigabytes in the same form factor. Eight years ago, 64MB cost $200. Today, you can get 1,000 times the capacity for just $50 more.

Corsair calls the bootable Flash Voyager shockproof, thanks in large part to its fully rubber sheath. Even the cap is rubber, although its ridged opening fits the drive's USB connector precisely enough to eliminate worries about it slipping off. Goodies include a tradeshow-caliber lanyard with a chromed thumb clip, a USB extension cable, and a branded drawstring bag. There's also a rubber cap retainer on a chain. The lanyard atachment point is rubber, too, but it seems tough enough.

The drive comes preformatted with FAT32, but that's easy enough to rectify. Our drive did't come with any of the bundled software the press release mentioned. Still, its 10-year warranty is attractive.

It took 3;13 (min:sec; 0.52MBps) to copy 100MB to the Flash Voyager with write caching enabled, but then Vista seems to make even a quad-core with VelociRaptop ridiculously slow at file transfers. The Corsair did read the test folder back in a mere 11 seconds, or at 9.1MBps.

If you're into carrying around your own bootable desktop and apps, but you're frustrated by the limitations of a smaller drive, a 64GB Flash Voyager can let you have your cake and eat it, too.

by Marty Sems
www.corsairmicro.com



Computer Power User January 2009

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Sony BWU-300S

This is the third-generation BD burner from Sony, and it's built for speed. The drive can push 6X media to 8X (35.96MBps). Sony says you might start to see blank 6X BD-Rs and BD-R DLs early this year, but the company had to slip us some media pulled from the Japanese market for our testing.

Is the speed increase for real? Yeah, it is, compared to Sony's earlier efforts. The BWU-300S can nearly fill a 50GB BD-R DL faster than previous models could lase a 25GB, rewritable BD-RE. This Sony is on par with the competition when it comes to belting out DVDs, too. It's not exactly a barnburner at ripping DVDs or CDs, however, although its CD burning speed is adequate.

In the retail box, there's a skinnier front panel for the disc tray, should the more attractive default fascia conflict with your case or artistic sensibilities. As for software, you'll get a CyberLink bundle for BD Profile 2.0 playback; BD-AV authoring, editing, and backup; along with a BD-Live-compatible Copy of "Men In Black."

As ever, Sony is on the high side when it comes to price. Online prices should be more palatable than the $399.99 MSRP, but it's still a hefty chunk of change considering how long Blu-ray has been around. Perhaps the financial hit the company reportedly takes every time it sells a PlayStation 3 at a loss (partly in an effort to push Blu-ray adoption, ironically) has to be paid elsewhere. Like here.

What should worry Sony is the fact that a 6X drive from LG, the GWB-H20L, can write BDs nearly twice as fast as this 8X drive (according to test results on page 72 or our October 2008 issue) and retails for $100 less.

by Marty Sems
www.sonystyle.com


Computer Power User January 2009.

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Eye-Fi SD Card Does Location Tracking

HAVE YOU EVER looked at a picture and wondered where you snapped it? The Eye-Fi Explore digital camera memory can help.

Like last year's $100 Eye-Fi Share, the $130 Eye-Fi Explore is 2GB Wi-Fi-enabled SD Card that will automatically upload your pictures to the Web site of your choice or to your computer. But the Explore adds two significant new features: automatic geotagging of images and the ability to upload pictures at a Wayport wireless network hotspot, at no extra charge.

Wayport hotspots can be found in many McDonald's restaurants, Hertz car rental outlets, hotels, and other venues. But since the Eye-Fi Explore doesn't provide a interface on your camera, you must keep an eye out for golden arches of Hertz signs, o ryou muct use a computer to find a hotspot.

Hotspot uploading functioned very incostitently in my test. Initially, the card wouldn't upload at all. After some discussions with the Eye-Fi, I trided again; this time, however, I reduced the capture resolution of my 10-megapixel Canon SD790IS to 0.3 mgapixel. That booted everything into gear.

I found the Eye-Fi's geotagging capability far more flexible. Most of the pictures I took appeared with location tags in place, and most of the locations were correct. But some of them-perhaps 20 percent-were off, sometimes significantly: A couple of pictures I took in South San Francisco were tagged as having been taken in Mountain View, California, about 30 miles away.



The Eye-Fi Explore card is clever, but it costs far more than an SD Card without wireless capabilties. In view of the price premium, it should work much better. -Allan Stafford

PC World November 2008

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Iomega Rev 120GB Backup Drive

Removable-cartridge alternative for backup



THE IOMEGA REV 120GB BACKUP DRIVE is a hard-disk-based storage device that uses removable cartridges. It's an alternative backup solution to traditional external hard drives or tape (like DAT), but for users with either very litle (or conversevly, too much) data to back up or archive, it's not cost-effective.
Besides the $499.99 drive-and-cartridge bundle that we reviewed, there's also the $699.99 Rev Server Backup Kit, which is ideal for business runing a server; it comes with five cartridges, along with CA's BrightStor ARCserver Backup and Distaster Recovery software.
Like tape-based cartridges, Rev cartridges allow the archival backup of servers, but Rev drives are faster. The drive heads aren't on the cartridge, so if a cartridge does fail, you won't have to replace an entire unit, as you would with a hard drive. But if you're an individual user, the Rev drive is overkill. Compared with portable hard drives, the Rev is severely limited in capacity, not to mention expensive.


Operation-wise, the Rev works just like a portable hard drive, and it's easy to set up and use. You can drag and drop files to it from your Mac OS X desktop or Windows'My Computer. Transfer times were also quite good: It took 8 minutes and 43 seconds to write a 10GB folder to the Rev cartridge, and 7 minutes and 58 seconds to read the same folder. The included Restrospect Express Backup software is a basic, easy-to-use app that lets you back up individual folders or an entire drive, as well as schedule backups at a more convenient time. - Les L. Shu

source: Computer Shopper October 2008.
www.iomega.com

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Buffalo LinkStation Mini (1TB)

Tiny storage unit needs better interface


THE BUFFALO LINKSTATION MINI is different from other network-attached storage (NAS) drives because it uses 2.5-inch hard drives instead of the larger 3.5-inch drives typically found in desktop PCs. Aside from its diminutive stature, the Mini is a rather run-of-the-mill NAS device with decent features. It's held back, however, by an archaic interface-and a high price ($599.99).
Weighing just 1.1 pounds, it includes two 5,400rpm 500GB hard drives inside its fanless chassis. A lone USB port can be used for adding storage or a printer to your network. You can run the Mini's hard drives in a stripped RAID Level 0 array for full capacity, or a RAID Level 1 array for better data security. There doesn't appear to be an easy way to access the drives, though, so if one fails, you'll like to have to crack the chassis open-not an ideal situation.
Setup was simple, but administration is handled via a cryptonic browser-based interface. Despite its dated look and feel, the interface does offer a host of useful options that makes it easy to set up online access and create users and groups,though backup software is notably missing. The Mini can also stream content to any PC or Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) device such as a set-top media box.


In our 10GB read/write test, the Mini placed at the low end of the NAS scale: 23 minutes and 20 seconds to write the file, and 15 minutes and 16 seconds to read it.-Josh Norem
source: Computer Shopper October 2008.
www.buffalotech.com

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OCZ Core Series SATA II SSD 64GB

Affordable solid-state drive best for notebook owners



IF YOU'VE BEEN CONSIDERING a solid-state drive (SSD) in your desktop or notebook but are put off by the high price, the OCZ Core Series may be affordable enough to change you rmind. Though $279 is a lot to pay for 64GB, this drive is significantly faster than a traditional 5,400rpm notebook hard drive.
The Core Series uses a standard 2.5-inch notebook form factor and has a Serial ATa (SATA) connector. It will slot right into most late-model notebooks, you'll have to buy an inexpensive 2.5-to-3.5-inch mounting kit. The drive comes preformatted, and it offers roughly 60GB of available space. The manufacturer claims a mean time between failure (MTBF) of about 186 yers-longer than any traditional hard drive. It features a SATA II interface, which allows burst rates up to 300MB per second, but this figure is largely irrelevant, since the entire drive is similar to a regular hard drive's buffer.
Setup is as simple as connecting the drive to a SATA port on your motherboard. In our tessts, we ran it without any active cooling, and the drive never got even slightly warm.


The Core Series' performance during our test was excellent compared with 10,000rpm and 7,200rpm desktop drives-and simply phenomenal compared with traditional 2.5-inch notebook drives. In our 10GB file-transfer test, the Core Series scored on par with a 7,200rpm hard drive, taking 5 minutes and 13 seconds to write the file, then 4 minute and 44 seconds to read it.
In our opinion, the biggest benefits of SSDs isn't their speed but their durability. That's a key concern for most notebooks owners, and they would benefit greatly from upgrading to a Core Series drive. -Josh Norem
source: Computer Shopper October 2008.

www.ocztechnology.com

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Thermaltake BlacX HDD Docking Station (ST005U)

Thermaltake BlacX HDD Docking Station (ST005U)

The popularity of external storage is probably all too familiar to you by now. However, this doesn't discredit the ingenuity behind Thermaltake's BlacX HDD Docking Station.
The BlacX is a brilliantly simple solution: It's designed for quick access to the data on a hard drive without busting open your system's chassis and manually installing the drive. There are two other details that you shouldn't overlook. Instead of jerking your drive out of the station, press the eject button to detach it, Pop-Tart style. Plus, the BlacX supports hot-swapping hard drives hard drives. And if you're worried about cooling issues, don't: The BlacX itself didn't generate any excess heat.
Saying that you install the BlacX is definitely a stretch: We were finished once we plugged in the power adapter and connected the station via USB cable. Next, we inserted our SATA hard drive (think NES game cartridge) and powered up the BlacX. Our PC recognized the drive almost immediately. We opened My Computer and were good to go.
Thermaltake has actually released three models of the BlacX, two of which are practically twins, save for the exlusion of eSATA connector on the N0028USU. The BlacX SE looks noticeably different than the former two: Its circular base features four USB 2.0 ports and a large, textured ejection button. It essentially performs the same function as the other docking stations. All three models support STA drives up to 1TB.

by Joanna Safford.
Specs: Interface: eSATA; USB 2.0; HDD capacity: 2.5 and 3.5-inch STA HDD; 480Mbps max transfer rate; OS support: Windows 95/98/2000/XP/Vista, Max 10.3 and later.

www.thermaltake.com

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Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM Recorder

Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM Recorder
"Digital recording that sounds better than a CD" is how Olympus touts the LS-10, which records MP3, WMA, or uncompressed wav files via two integrated stereo mics. Studens, journalists, podcasters, and musicians should also know this compact beauty is shirt-pocket-friendly, one-handed operational, and records audio that approaches studio levels at an alluring sub-$400 price.
The LS-10's exceptional ease of use comes by way of a blacklit 1.8-inch LCD, jog dial, intiutive menus, and smart design touches. On the LS-10's left, for example, you can manually adjust recording levels, set microphone sensitivity to Low (indoor/band demos) or High (outdoors/conferences), and active a Low Cut filter that minimizes low-frequency levels. A list button display recording, which save up to five folder (200 files each). An additional Music folder holds transfered songs for playback via headphones or the LS-10's two stereo speakers (decent quality; weak volume). There's also a configurable Fn button; tripod connector; mini USB port; and mic, line-in, 3.5mm headphone, and remote jacks.
WAV recordings top out at 96KHz, 24-bit; MP3s at 320KBps;and WMAs at 160Kbps. My indoor (office, living room, conference room) and outdoor (backyard, street intersection, ballpark) recording possessed impressive clarity, solid volume levels, and a wealth of surprising sound nuances. A WAV recording from my backyard, for example, captured the low-level humming and buzzing of a guitar amp and the bright chirping of birds with equal clarity. Files I burned to CD were also impressive. Overall, I preferred manually adjusting recording levels over auto adjustments.
Olympus includes Steinberg Cubase LE4 editing software and integrates hit-and-miss Reverb (Normal, Studio, Hall, Club, Dome) and Euphony (Normal, Natural, Wide, Power) playback effects. A Zoom Mic setting can also apply Wide (surround sound), Standard, Narrow, and Zoom parameter to recordings. Despite lacking extras (namely XLR jacks) that some more-expensive competitors offers, the LS-10 provides numerous high-end features at a price that's not high end.
by Blaine Flamig
Specs: Two wind screens included; Rated battery life: 12 hours (2 AA); 2GB onboard storage; stores up to 3:10 (hours:minutes) uncompressed WAV files; SD slot (support up to 8GB cards).
source: Computer Power User October 2008.
www.olympus.com

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Pioneer Ups The Blu-ray Disc Ante Again

Pioneer Ups The Blu-ray Disc Ante Again
Apparently, producing a 16-layer optical disc capable of storing 400GB of data wasn't good enough for Pioneer. Roughly a month after it announced the feasibility of creating such a Blu-ray disc, Pioneer upped the capacity to 500GB in a presentation at the International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage in late July. Pioneer states that by using proprietary technology and stacking layers of alternating thickness, it can reduce "interlayer crosstalk" on disc, thus making a 20-layer optical dic possible. Current Blu-ray discs come in single-layer 25GB and double-layer 50GB options. The goal is now having 20-layer discs ready between 2010 and 2012.

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Western Digital Velociraptor

Western Digital Velociraptor
Hard drive is incredibly fast, but has limited capacity

IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR the fastest desktop hard drive available-and don't mind a 300GB capacity and $299.99 price-you'll be very happy with Western Digital's 10,000rpm Velociraptor.
The Velociraptor is a 2.5-inch drive that comes with a special aluminium heat sink (called an IcePAK) that lets it fit inside a standard PC hard drive cage. The only drawback to this design is that the SATA connectors are in the middle of the unit, which prevents its use in external enclosures. The drive also does not support hot-swapping.
The Velociraptor ships with a STA II interface, which is capable of data transfer rates up to 3 gigabits (300 megabytes) per second. It also allows for a faster "burst" rate, speedily transferring cached data from its internal memory instead of from the physical platters. The package includes a 16MB cache, a single SATA II cable, and a 5-year warranty.
To test the drive's speed, we performed a basic 10GB read/write test, and we ran HD Tach 3.0 to check its seek time and sequential read performance. The Velociraptor displayed a super-fast seek time of 6.9ms-twice as fast as competing drives we've tested-and its HD Tach sequential read speed of 110MB/sec is almost double that of larger drives. It took only 2 minutes and 55 seconds to read and 3 minutes 10 seconds to write 10GB.
Better yet, the Velociraptor was largely inaudible throughout our testing, and it didn't feel warm to the touch, even after a few hours of fanless operation-J.N.
source: Computer Shopper September 2008.

www.westerndigital.com

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LACIE LITTLE BIG DISK QUADRA

Video Pro's Dream Drive


Power users such as video professionals who need to move large files quickly have a new ally. The LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra relies on twin 5,400-rpm, 250GB drives for lightning-fast eSATa transfer rates (60 percent faster than its USB 2.0 performance) and very good FireWire 400 and 800 speeds.
The Little Big Disk Quadra is good both as an external desktop drive and for moving between machines. Technically, it doesn't qualify as a portable hard drive because it requires an AC adapter-at least for USB and eSATA operation. (FIreWire 400 and 800 transfers can be powered by the computer.) With its two 2.5-inch drives stacked on top of one another, it measures only 1.6 by 3.3 by 5.5 inches (HWD). The drive is totable enough, but it still looks substantial with its metal frame and cooling fins.
The drive can be formatted for either Windows (NTFS) or Mac (HFS+). Formatting in FAT32 for use with both platforms limit file size to 4GB, which can be easily exceeded by video files. It is loaded with backup software galore: LaCie 1-Click: EMC's Restospect Express (a full disaster-recovery utility); and LaCie SilverKeeper (Mac). It is also covered by a decent three-year warranty.


The LaCie Little Big Disk Quadra is a unique drive that should come as a welcome addition to any poewr user's or Video professional's hardware stable.
source: PC Magazine August 2008.

www.lacie.com

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Hard Drive Review: Western Digital WD7500AACS

Western Digital WD7500AACS
Newest "Green" Caviar SE16

"Green" hard drive campaign by Western Digital make them launch GP (GreenPower) series hard drives. One of the GP series hard drives is Western Digital WD7500AACS.
WD7500AACS have 750GB capacity. Its weight almost same as 3.5" 1TB desktop harddisk that use 4 discs although the WD7500AACS only use 3 discs. The harddisk is one of Cavier SE16 series with 16MB cache for fastest performance. GP protocol make the harddisk to be more efficient on power comsuming. It's about 4 to 5 watt less than conventional harddisk.

This WD 750GB is superior on burst speed that read rate. Although the seagate harddisk with same capacity is fastest, the WD7500AACS have advantes on power safer feature. Use this harddisk, save the world from global warming.

SPECIFICATION
WD7500ACS (CAVIAR SE16)
Interface: SATA II (3Gb/s)
Capacity: 750GB (3,5")
Buffer cache: 16MB
Seek time(avg): -
Rotation speed: -
MTBF: -
Weight (g): 716
www.westerndigital.com
Price: US$239

TEST RESULT
Random access: 14,ms
CPU utilization: 2%
Average read: 64,1 MB/sec
Burst speed: 224,1 MB/sec

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