Wednesday's Hardware Buys

Singapore
The largest capacity hard disk in the world is the Hitachi 7K400 - currently held with a Seagate drive. It is on sale at Storage Studio for S$ 849, roughly £250+VAT. This represents a serious investment but given the capacity of the drive, 400GB unformatted - 372GB FAT32 formatted, the price is absolutely justified. It features five 80GB platters as compared to Seagate's top 133GB platter.

Average seek time is 8.5ms, buffer size 8MB and spindle speed 7200rpm. A serial interface is used via an embarked converter although a parallel interface version does exists. According to various reviews, the 7K400, successor of the 7K250, is one of the faster hard disks on the market thanks to technologies incorporated like the RVS - rotational vibration safeguard and the ATA streaming feature set.

Even though it might be noisier and generate more heat than most current hard disks, the sheer idea of having eight of these babies in a RAID-0 SATA hot-swappable configuration using the 7K400 is pretty enthralling. As a single unit, it is able to capture nearly 2,500 minutes of HDTV quality programmes or nearly 100,000 MP3 songs. Hardwarezone were sufficiently impressed by the drive to give it a Most innovative Product award.

Spotted on videopro.com.sg pricelist is an oddity. An LGA socket 775 motherboard working on a i865 chipset. The Gigabyte GA-8IPE775Pro features the midrange chipset i865PE and costs S$229, less than £70+VAT. It seems to be destined for those who want to use existing tried and tested components instead of the newly emerging standards. Hence the list of functionalities does not differ that much from any midrange motherboard. The GA-8IPE775Pro comes with Hyperthreading and 800Mhz FSB support.

It has an AGP8X slot and dual DDR400 memory architecture support. Also on the list are two Gigabyte only marchitecture gimmicks. CIA and MIB - obviously not what these famous acronyms are supposed to mean. CIA stands for CPU intelligent accelerator, equivalent to an overclocking utility. The MIB stands for Memory Intelligent Booster and does the same for memory. On top of that, the taiwanese company has bundles the Xpress3 package which includes Xpress Install for easier driver installation, Xpress BIOS rescue and Xpress Recovery. As for the other specs, they include four DIMM slots, two SATA ports and two Firewire ports, six USB 2.0 ports, Gigabyte LAN, 7.1 channel support via Realtek ALC850, five PCI slots, SPDIF support, CPU FSB/Multiplier/Vcore Voltage, AGP Voltage/Clock and DIMM Voltage/Clock all adjustable via BIOS. Norton Internet Security 2003 is also provided. µ

UK
£24.99 is not much those days. A lunch in a restaurant can often cost more than that, maybe not in BurgerKing. Bigpockets.co.uk is selling a 5.1 unit at that price and it includes VAT and free delivery on this item and all orders that you will add at the same time in your basket. The Yamada H8150 is manufactured by Umax. This brand is not unknown to us as we had covered one of their digital cameras some time back. Yamada is well known for producing items with excellent value for money and the H8150 follows the rules. It features five 3.6W satellites and a 14W woofer.

Frequency response goes from 40Hz to 20KHz. At that price, one cannot be surprised to see that the woofer is made up of wood while the rest is in plastic. It boasts compatibility with Dolby 5.1 surround systems and while you will need a converter for its jack, you will be hard pressed to find a better deal especially since it comes with a one year warrranty. You might also want to search the web for the stunning looking H8700 featuring aluminium 30w column satellites, an AM/FM tuner and a remote control which sells for £170. Expensive but truly exceptional.

A Gumtree seller has put his old laptop for sale. Featuring a Celeron 266MHz with 128k cache - not one of the castrated Covington ones, allowing it to reach Pentium 266Mhz performance. The Fujitsu Lifebook C332 also has 64MB of memory, a 3.2GB hard disk as well as a floppy disk drive and a CDROM drive. At £120, it is a bargain, considering that ebay sells similar laptops for £150. It uses a Trident video chipset to power its 12.1" TFT screen and it has both USB and PCMCIA ports as well as others. This second hand laptop is fully functional and has a working battery. OS provided is Windows 98 with Microsoft Office and although it does not come with a modem, you do have a LAN interface. Furthermore, its 4KG weight might be too much to carry around all day. Also on sale was a Dell Pentium II 400 laptop with 128MB RAM, 11 GB hard disk, built in CDROM, Windows XP, Office XP, a leather bag and loads of other stuff, everything for only £130. The cheap price is explained by the fact that the battery is dead and needs replacing. Even then, this laptop, probably a Latitude, is ideal for a homeworker or a cash strapped student. µ