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 »
iOS App of the Week I’ve tried a number of ‘remote Desktop’ apps that allow you to control a Mac or a PC from an iPhone or iPad, but their performance over a wireless network has always been too sluggish for them to be of much practical use.
Set-up is effectively automatic on the iDevice
Not surprisingly, then, I was quite sceptical when the recently updated Splashtop was claimed to be fast enough to even stream watchable Flash video to iOS devices. And to other devices – Splashtop Remote Desktop is available on Android too. Read the rest of this entry »
When, last year, the price of decent SSD drives veered towards £1-a-gigabyte, I decided this was no longer the enviable domain of the hot-rodder. Concerns about data integrity were enough to keep me hesitant. But finally, I took the plunge. It was a revelation.
Currently an upgrade for most laptops, SSDs are destined to become standard issue
In twenty years of trying to eke a bit of extra performance from my machines, nothing has made quite such a dramatic difference, although there have been some reasonable performance boosts along the way.
I’m often called out to fix something, and for the last 15 years it’s been fairly easy to fix somebody’s ailing machine. If it’s on fire, grab a damp tea towel. If it’s clicking, they need a new hard disk. For the rest of the time, adding a bit of memory to a grinding system has usually made the difference between torture and comfort, and been doable on the cheap. Read the rest of this entry »
On the face of it, Apple’s Mac Mini makes most ‘small form-factor’ PCs look like a pile of junk. The Mini’s ultra-compact design also makes it ideal for use in an office or as a stylish little media centre in the living room. Evidently, Dell has taken note – hence the appearance of its Inspiron Zino range of compact PCs.
Splits from Atom: Dell’s Inspiron Zino HD
It’s always been surprising that no Windows PC has ever really come along to challenge the Mac Mini – especially given Apple’s creeping price hikes. The Mac Mini is now far from the low-cost Mac that it was originally intended to be, with the cheapest incarnation currently priced at £510. That’s hardly a bargain given that it doesn’t include a monitor, keyboard or mouse.
We’ve seen a few compact ‘nettop’ boxes, such as Acer’s Revo, in recent months, but these have tended to use low-power Atom processors that couldn’t pass muster as a proper Desktop PC. However, Dell’s Zino HD packs a more powerful Desktop processor.
Dell simply describes the Inspiron Zino HD as a “mini Desktop computer” but its design clearly suggests that it’s intended as a living room media centre too. Measuring 195mm square and 85mm high, it’s larger than the 163 x 163 x 50mm Mac Mini. The Zino HD isn’t quite as neatly designed as the Apple, either. The black plastic chassis looks a bit cheap when sitting alongside the silvery metallic trim of the Mac. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The Aspire Revo is Acer’s take on Nvidia’s Ion platform so that’s a good place to start with this review.
Acer’s Aspire Revo: Atom and Ion on board
Ion started life as the GeForce 9300, which is a chipset that connects Intel’s Core 2 processors to decent integrated graphics. In our comparison of Desktop chipsets with integrated graphics we were quite clear that the GeForce 9300 was better than Intel’s G45, specifically in the area of HD movie decoding. If you’re building a Core 2-based PC with integrated graphics, we strongly recommend you choose GeForce 9300.
When Intel launched the Desktop Atom processor, it made the questionable decision to ally the 4W TDP CPU with the ancient D945G chipset, which has weak graphics and a TDP of 15W.
The combination of Atom and D945G has been responsible for the creation of the market for ‘nettop’ Desktop PCs that offer basic services such as e-mail and browsing the web at a low price. There’s no expectation that Atom and D945G can be used for gaming or to watch HD movies, and the graphics are so weak that it’s unable to run Windows Vista properly.
Intel could have chosen to support Atom with the G45 chipset, which is a capable piece of silicon, but it didn’t go down that route, undoubtedly to protect its higher-value Desktop offerings. So Nvidia has leapt in to fill what it perceives as a gap in the market.
Designed for edge-on operation
The Ion chipset is a rebranding exercise for the GeForce 9300, this time offered with support for Atom rather than Core 2. Nvidia is keen to show that you get better value for money by spending your cash on the GPU rather than the CPU, so it’s cockahoop that a manufacturer as big as Acer has rolled out the Aspire Revo. Read the rest of this entry »
