Storage till kingdom come

RUNNING OUT OF SPACE on your hard drive? Chock-full with movies, games, music and pr0n? Well, Extremetech added two more drives to their “Terabyte roundup” – the Samsung SpinPoint F-Series HD103UJ and the Hitachi A7K1000. These are quite different between them as the Hitachi is an older design. They’ve updated results with some good numbers for Hitachi (performance) and Samsung (power). Find your Tera of storage right here.

There are lots of little nifty gadgets coming out for laptops. Modern laptops that is. The kind of laptops that have Express Card slots – meaning, unless you buy a new laptop, you’ll be left out to dry on the latest dongles while on the road. Well Apiotek has a PC Card to Express Card converter on review at Mikhailtech. It'll let you plug Express cards on your aging laptop. Say you’re interested in SSD, but can’t plug the appropriate card... this’ll sort you out.

Zepto - no, not one of the Marx brothers - has been known to sell laptops built to order (within reason, we assume). The laptop builder has shipped off one of their little custom beasties (Znote 3415W) to Trusted Reviews who’s given it a look-over. Sporting a T9300 processor, this mobile Penryn-based laptop is one of the fastest they’ve tested so far down at the ole Lab. Battery suffers a bit, and it’s ugly as sin (reminding us of very ancient Thinkpads). Still, you can’t beat raw performance. Read the review.

MatBe is looking into the virtues and flaws of QuadFire, much like their anglo counterparts across the world. Their QuadFire config was sucking away 550W while fully loaded. Noise, heat and the disappearance of the motherboard underneath the two mammoths are serious drawbacks, but then again, it will also be a drawback with Nvidia’s solutions. You can get QuadFire in €uroland for about 700 €urobucks, the reviewer figures – so maybe, just maybe, it makes more sense to go 2x HD3870 and dropping QuadFire altogether. Read it in French here, and Anglais ici.

Legion Hardware has a goodie for us, a review/face-off between a 790i Ultra SLI and a 780i SLI. Both are running the E8400 but with different memory configs (DDR3 vs. DDR2). Even though the race is tight, SLI seems to be the clincher in this comparison. When testing SLI, performance on the 790i Ultra SLI managed to steal a few frames from its parent. Like Steven said – all things considered equal, the only difference is the chipset. Jump a generation here.

MemoRight sounds like an outlook add-in, but it isn’t. They actually build a solid state drive that goes by the name of GT MR25.2-064S – if you haven’t guessed already - it’s a 64GB SSD drive. Although Olin mentions the ICH9/R bug in the review, but the mobo they used (a Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6) has a separate controller so this does not restrict performance... which by the way zooms at around 120MB/s. Speedy but still offensively expensive. Read the re-view. µ