Review Panasonic returns to the UK DVR market after an abortive early foray, with a 3D-enabled, media-streaming TV recorder. Rather more convincing than the brand’s first generation model, the DMR-HW100 offers access to the online VieraCast portal, has jukebox functionality and is only slightly bonkers.
Panasonic’s DMR-HW100 offers one way of getting your 3D photos up on the screen
Panasonic’s Blu-ray recorders, while technically impressive, seem almost wilfully complicated in this era of Sky+ and TiVo. Thankfully, this Freeview HD DVR is significantly more approachable. It doesn’t baffle with a multitude of recording modes, for one. Read the rest of this entry »
Review If the name of this hard drive isn’t explicit enough, one look at it will tell you exactly who it’s aimed at. The brushed aluminium surround and smoky black top mean that it looks right at home sitting beneath an iMac or Applecinema Display.
Iomega’s Mac Companion: storage plus USB hub
Iomega’s attempt to woo style-conscious users of Apple kit goes further than fluttering its eyelashes and showing a bit of leg, however. The 2TB or 3TB drive, depending on which version you choose, is formatted as HFS+, for out-of-the-box compatibility with Mac OS X. Read the rest of this entry »
Product Round-up Despite somewhat lacklustre adoption of the interface in the last 18 months, USB 3.0 is starting to gain a foothold in the consumer market as availability increases and prices fall down to more reasonable levels.
The current offerings of USB 3.0 portable hard drives in our recent round-up turned out to be a pleasant surprise for performance and value. Yet typically portable storage relies on 2.5in drives that limit the available capacity.
In this SuperSpeed storage round-up, 3.5in drives are tested. Intended to languish on your desk these data dumpsters offer a much wider range of capacities. Featuring simple case designs none of the models on test suffered any distracting noise or vibration. While portable to an extent, all the drives here relied on external power supplies.
Each drive is rated bearing in mind cost, capacity and speed with a CrystalDiskMark 3 performance comparison chart at the end.
1. Buffalo DriveStation HD-LBU3
Buffalo has once again stuck to its traditional format of no-frills drives with the latest USB 3.0 DriveStation. The 2TB disk I have here came out at 1863GB formatted and benchmarked bang in the middle of all of the drives tested. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Patriot Memory’s latest Wildfire Sata 3 SSDs come with the promise of read and write speeds in excess of 500MB/s along with read and write IOPS in the 60K region. All of this blazing speed is available in 120GB (£240), 240GB (£420) and 480GB capacities – a 60GB version is in production, but not currently available in the UK.
Life in the fast lane: Patriot Memory’s Wildfire
The 120GB drive I have here for review is an engineering sample, but I am assured that purchasers of the retail product will receive the usual complement of proper packaging and 3.5in drive bay adapter. Read the rest of this entry »
Accessory of the Week If Apple won’t go USB 3.0, at least almost every other computer maker has. While eSata, Firewire 800 and Thunderbolt are certainly better for Desktop drives, SuperSpeed is the only choice when you want to copy files quickly onto a stick and go.
Kingston’s DataTraveler Ultimate G2 is its latest USB 3.0 Flash drive, replacing the the first-gen drives that, while they performed well, had a tendency to get rather hot when connected and shuffling bits back and forth.
The G2 retains the previous model’s chunky casing, so if you like your Flash keys slim and discreet, this one isn’t for you. Read the rest of this entry »
