Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Filed under: Laptops

You already know full well what these buggers look like, and you’ve even had ample time to roll that 8920 review around in your noggin. Now, the moment of truth has arrived. Both of Acer’s Gemstone Blue lappies — the 16-inch Aspire 6920 and 18.4-inch Aspire 8920 — are finally available in North America. Prospective buyers can snatch either up starting at $849 / $1,299, respectively, though real hardware junkies will insist on paying more for those high-brow components. Shamelessly, at that.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Storage

We already had some early benchmarks of Western Digital’s speedy new VelociRaptor hard drive the day it was announced, but the folks at Extreme Tech have now had a bit more time to spend with the drive, and they′ve churned out a full review of it for those that still haven’t made up their mind. As with others, they found the drive more than lived up to its promise of being the “world’s fastest SATA disk,” with it even beating out many solid state drives in terms of write performance. The biggest downsides, as you might expect, are its relatively high (but not unreasonable) price to gigabyte ratio, and its maximum 300GB capacity, although that’s nothing a second (or third) drive can’t solve. Of course, they don’t stop there, and you can find plenty of charts and comparisons to quench your curiosity by hitting up the link below.

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Western Digital (WD) released their latest VelociRaptor 300GB hard drive. The WD VelociRaptor hard disk drive (HDD) is one scary looking beast! This puppy spins at 10,000 RPM - fast enough to tear through your gigabytes of naked flesh in nanoseconds. Did I say gigabytes of ‘naked flesh’?  I meant gigabytes of important files - you know Word documents, financial spreadsheets, music files, iTunes videos, etc.

The WD VelociRaptor HDD was engineered for maximum speed. WD VelociRaptor’s 10,000 RPM SATA hard drive combines a SATA 3 Gb/s interface and 16 MB cache, to deliver performance that&rsquos up to 35% faster than its speedy older brother, the Raptor.

The hard drive enclosure is pretty scary as well. The heat sink just screams "I’m one bad ass hard drive."

Key Features
Killer Speed - Built on the performance bloodlines of WD Raptor, these 10,000 RPM drives, with SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and 16 MB cache deliver mind-bending performance. According to WD, "Not only are they 35 percent faster than the previous generation WD Raptor drives, but they also beat out all other competitors in the field."

Rock-solid Reliability - Designed and manufactured to mission-critical enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. With 1.4 million hours MTBF, these drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high capacity SATA drive.

Double the Capacity - State-of-the-art technology packs twice the capacity per disk compared to its older brother WD Raptor resulting in 300 GB of high-performance storage space in this enterprise-class 2.5-inch drive. (Not compatible with notebook computers)

IcePack™ Mounting Frame - The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor is enclosed in a 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in heat sink that keeps this powerful little drive extra cool when installed in high-performance desktop chassis.

Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF™) - Optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.

SecurePark™ - Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long-term reliability and increased drive protection when the chassis is moved.

The VelociRaptor comes with a sweet 5-year limited warranty!

Tags: 300GB, hard drive, Raptor, VelociRaptor, WD, Western Digital

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Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Storage

Overclockers and gamers, prepare to meet your next hard drive: the 300GB VelociRaptor from Western Digital. Said to be 35% faster than previous WD Raptors, the 10,000 RPM drive features a 3Gbps SATA interface, 16MB cache, and impressive 1.4 million hour MTBF thanks in part to the IcePack Mounting Frame. The IcePack heat sink not only keeps the drive spinning extra cool, it also bumps the 2.5-inch HDD to a required 3.5-inch drive bay. Available exclusively on Alienware’s ALX gaming desktop this month and then up for grabs for everybody with $300 to burn starting mid-May.

Here come the benchmarks. It’s freaky fast — even holds up well to SSDs at a far better dollar-per-byte ratio according to MaximumPC.

Read — Tom’s Hardware
Read — MaximumPC
Read — PCPer
Read — HotHardware

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Original post by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Storage

Face it: Western Digital’s My Passport Essential family of portable hard drives was hamstrung from day one. After all, with just about every other external HDD from the company coming in any amount of colors, who exactly is going to be kosher with just black? Never fear, as WD’s dutiful painting squad has stepped up and given prospective buyers 11 different hues to select from. Each drive comes in 120GB, 160GB, 250GB and 320GB capacities and gets all the juice it needs via USB 2.0, but choosing between candy apple red and banana yellow could really slow up the checkout process.

[Via I4U News]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Displays, Peripherals

Certainly not the first to conjure up such wares, Gefen is hopping in the USB display adapter game with its own USB-to-DVI adapter. The unit supports screen resolutions up to 1,600 x 1,200 and plays nice with all 32-bit versions of Windows as well as OS X. As you’re probably well aware, up to a half dozen of these critters can be connected to a single PC at a time, and any attempt to use seven or more will likely cause a catastrophic meltdown. Unfortunately, these things are still a tad pricey, and even Gefen’s will set you back a stiff $129. Full release posted after the jump (which affirms OS X support).

Continue reading Gefen’s USB-to-DVI adapter handles UXGA

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Peripherals

Sure, setting out for a trek around the globe sounds like fun and games at first, but when you plop down in that Welsh hotel and realize your US power adapter is worthless, terror can quickly ensue. Fret not, fellow argonauts, as the Universal Travel Adapter with USB Port has arrived to clear your mind of worry and ensure that your wares can be juiced up from almost anywhere. For $17, you’ll get plugs for the US, UK, European Union and Australia, but it seems you’re on your own if heading to Botswana.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Peripherals

Given the fact that most (all?) 3G USB modems won′t even fit in the MacBook Air’s ultra-cramped USB port, it’s practically a foregone conclusion that some of that sex appeal is going to be forfeited when busting out a dongle to keep using your current wares. Enter the AirQueue, which is hailed as the first USB extender designed specifically to work with the MBA — whatever that means. Truth be told, we can’t figure out exactly what makes this any different than other extenders made for helping folks out in a squeeze, but at least it’s only $6, right? Oh, and if you’re aiming to make things extra unsightly, be sure and pick up the pictured $38 ExpressCard adapter — your coffee shop style quotient will be tanked in no time.

[Via MacsimumNews, thanks RD]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Laptops

So now that the nine-inch Eee is officially available with Windows XP pre-installed, people are wondering the obvious — why XP and not Vista, since XP is being discontinued in June and Vista can kinda-sorta be made to run on an Eee? The answer, direct from Microsoft, is both obvious and a little surprising: Given the Eee’s “other requirements,” Asus and Microsoft “couldn’t go the Vista route,” presumably because the Eee doesn’t really have the horsepower for it. Sure, but what caught our interest was that Microsoft is “in close discussions with Asus [regarding] how to take that forward… in regards to the Windows 7 Europe timeframe.” Windows 7, you’ll recall, has that lean new kernel, which would presumably make building a stripped-down version specifically for Eee-class machines easier — but the last we heard, Windows 7 wasn’t due until at least mid-2009 (and possibly not until 2011), so either Microsoft is planning to continue shipping XP after June or Windows 7 is coming much earlier than we thought. Our money is on XP continuing to soldier on, but here’s hoping.

[Thanks, Omar]

 

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Original post by Nilay Patel

This one managed to sneak under the Gearlog radar earlier this week, as we scrambled to cover the CES madness. Apple, it seems, couldn’t wait a full week for another chance at media glory: On Tuesday, it launched its newest desktop and server in advance of Macworld Expo.

The new Mac Pro features a PCI Express 2.0-based ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256Mb, 3.2-GHz 8-core Xeon processing, a 1,600-MHz frontside bus, 800-MHz memory, and four terabyte hard drives. “The new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac we′ve ever made,” said Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Philip Schiller. The system starts at $2,799.

Like the new Macbook, Apple’s Xserve server is also based on the new Intel 45-nm quad-core Xeon processor. The unit starts at $2,999, including up to a pair of quad-core 3.0-GHz Intel Xeon processors.

The announcement really seems geared more toward professionals–more consumer-minded Apple fans will likely have to wait until Macworld next week to find something to really cheer about.

Original post by Brian Heater

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

In addition to laying down the smack, AMD and the office of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo just slammed Intel with an antitrust probe. Cuomo’s office issued a “wide-ranging subpoena” on Thursday seeking documents and more information from Intel. The probe was launched after a preliminary probe “raised questions″ about Intel coercing customers to exclude AMD CPUs.

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Original post by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Laptops

For those of you infatuated by the Eee‘s stylish looks, but in need of something a little more powerful, it looks like ASUS may be answering your prayers today. Enter the U6S and U6E laptops, two handsome new models that should fit your power-hungry needs. The systems are built atop the much-loved Santa Rosa chipset, Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs (in a variety of speeds), up to 2GB of RAM, 250GB hard drives, and offer either the NVIDIA GeForce 8400M G or Intel’s GMA X3100 GPU, 802.11a/b/g/n or 802.11a/b/g, plus a whole nasty mess of ports, jacks, inputs, outputs, and assorted doohickeys. Both are available now, starting at $1,749. Oh yeah, the laptops also utilize their built-in webcams to verify users via face recognition — hit the videos after the break to see Engadget Chinese easily fake out the security.

Continue reading ASUS brings the U6 laptops Stateside

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Joshua Topolsky