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 Panasonic has a reputation for building digital TV recorders that have impressive features, but are about as user friendly as an angry dominatrix. Maintaining at least one tradition here, the DMR-BWT700 certainly doesn’t skimp on the feature front. It has a 350GB hard drive on board, packs a Blu-ray recorder and can burn discs of both HD and SD broadcasts from its integrated Freeview HD tuner.
Recording industry: Panasonic’s DMR-BWT700
On top of this it also acts as an entertainment hub, by offering internet TV support and digital media playback either from USB devices or across a network from a PC or NAS drive. The question is, has Panasonic managed to wrap this all up in a user interface that doesn’t require you to have a Nasa engineer at hand to help you operate it? Read the rest of this entry »
Review The Seagate Barracuda XT is the latest 2TB hard drive to land on our test bench, following on from the WD Caviar Black and Green and the Hitachi Ultrastar. It’s the largest capacity Seagate we have seen since the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 so you may think that Seagate was as keen as mustard to scatter review samples to the waiting world.
Seagate’s Barracuda XT: Sata 3.0 supported
In fact, our Barracuda XT came from an unusual source. It was sent to us by Gigabyte, the manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards. The explanation for this unusual state of affairs is that the Barracuda XT is the first hard drive that supports 6Gb/s Sata 3.0.
Sata initially had a nominal bandwidth of 1.5Gb/s which was increased to 3.0Gb/s with Sata 2.0. Now we have Sata 3.0 and a further doubling of bandwidth. There’s potential for confusion as Sata encodes eight bits of data as a ten-bit symbol so the ‘true’ bandwidths for those SATA standards are 150MB/s, 300MB/s and 600MB/s, respectively.
Naturally enough, you need a suitable controller to support the new Sata standard and this is where Gigabyte enters the equation. There is no system-logic chipset at present that natively supports Sata 3.0 and we don’t expect to see native support until 2011. In the meantime, we have to rely on motherboards from the likes of Gigabyte that have been updated with a discrete Sata 3.0 controller. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Back in August 2009, Hitachi announced that it was “shipping the industry’s first 2TB 7200rpm Desktop hard disk drive” in the shape of the Deskstar 7K2000.
Hitachi’s Ultrastar A7K2000: better duration specs than the Deskstar
That statement may have been accurate, depending on your definition of ‘shipping’, but we received a 2TB 7200rpm WD Caviar Black – reviewed here in September, and it has taken Hitachi this long to deliver its own 2TB drive.
Imagine our mild surprise when we opened the box Hitachi sent us and found a 2TB Ultrastar A7K2000 rather than the Deskstar 7K2000 that we had expected. Imagine our shock when we discovered that the Ultrastar sells for a pricy £243 while the Deskstar has a tiny price tag of £130.
To put that in context, the 2TB WD Caviar Black drive with 64MB of cache cost £204 at launch and has actually risen slightly in price since then to around £215 now. If you find a 2TB Caviar Black on sale for £169, you can be sure it’s the old version with 16MB of cache, but the difference between what Hitachi and WD are both now charging seems ridiculous. Read the rest of this entry »
Review We’ve seen a fair few hard drives with built-in fingerprint readers, but here’s one that uses RFID cards instead of digits.
Freecom’s Hard Drive Secure: there’s a RFID reader behind the drive’s glossy front
The notion is simple: if you want to access the data on the drive, you’ll need to touch the unit with a smartcard to do so. No card, no files. And the protected data is encrypted to AES standard – 128-bit at a guess – to hinder any herbert who tries to get to the information by other means.
Freecom’s simply named Hard Drive Secure is further protected with a seamless brushed aluminium casing, though the front and back are glossy black plastic. There are no obvious screw-holes, though we wouldn’t put ripping off the rubber feet or prising off the back panel beyond any sufficiently zealous data thief.
The unit is a little less than twice the size of a regular 3.5in hard drive, the enclosure having been designed to take up to 2TB of storage, though the model we had in to look at had a more modest, 500GB storage capacity. There are a couple of tiny LEDs on the front – more on this in a moment – and a printer-style USB connector on the back alongside the power socket and on-off switch. Read the rest of this entry »
