Loyd Case

A Digital Interface for Digital VideoThe march to a fully digital experience in the living room has been glacial at times. HDTVs travails, and issues of content protection, have made both consumers and manufacturers skittish about adopting new technology for the living room. After all, who wants to go through another Betamax cycle again? However, […]

Sony recently released the specs for the Playstation Portable, aka the PSP, which isnt slated for release until late 2004. When Sony first discussed the PSP at last Mays E3 Expo, most people initially thought that Sony was targeting Nintendos Gameboy line of portable gaming devices. But if you take a look at the specs, […]

If the new 52X CD drives could actually write at 52X speeds over an entire disc, youd be able to duplicate a 650MB CD in about 1 minute 20 seconds. But the units reviewed here are constant angular velocity (CAV) drives, so recording speed varies according to how close a track is to the center […]

Serial ATA Approaches MainstreamWe last examined Serial ATA drive technology when we took a look at (“the Seagate 120GB SATA drive”) back in January. SATA drives trickled onto the market in the past few months, but the floodgates are starting to open. In this review, we look at a pair of drives that are targeted […]

Not long ago, I wrote a piece about ATA RAID (“RAID Goes Mainstream”), where I discussed some of my experiences with Intels recent release of ICH5R. I also outlined a few tips as to how to set up motherboard-down RAID. That spawned a very interesting discussion about reliability and backup. A couple of readers rightfully […]

This is an era of rich media for both home and business. But multimedia and real time 3-D applications—ripping CDs, playing the latest 3-D computer games, authoring multimedia content, and the like—require substantial memory bandwidth, which has demanded high-end systems, in the past. Intel is altering that equation with the launch of the 865PE chip […]

Intel Developer Forum had traditionally closed with sneak peeks into Intels research efforts. Were not talking a specific product area — i.e., researching 90nm technology in order to build a CPU. Rather, Intel unveils research initiatives that are more far-flung. Some are clearly efforts to develop additional business opportunities, while others simply explore possibilities that […]

Making Backups Easy Product: Maxtor 5000DV Web Site: www.maxtor.com Pro: Huge capacity, quiet, performs well Con: Pricey; no “off” switch Summary: An excellent secondary backup device for small networks or a small office environment with both USB 2.0 and FireWire connectivity supported. Score: Price: $399, check prices Backing up your system seems to get harder […]

Dueling Standards Company: Sony Pioneer Electronics Product: DRU-500A DVD+RW / DVD-RW recorder DVR-A05U DVD-RW recorder Pro: High degree of format flexibility; excellent performance in most tests Significant improvement in DVD-R/RW write performance. Con: Only 1x DVD-RW writing. DVD read performance oddly slow. Only 8x CD-RW writing performance; extremely long format time for packet writing prep. […]

The Conundrum of Big Storage”> My system has 240GB on it — two 120GB physical drives. I say that, not to brag — I know quite a few people with even more storage — but because having that much storage creates a major headache: backups. Backing up to CD-RW or even DVD rewritables isnt really […]

Blu-Ray is the new standard for optical recording. Offering capacities up to 50GB on a single, CD-sized disk, Blu-Ray holds the promise of HD-quality movies in the familiar CD/DVD-sized format. While it will be some time before off-the-shelf HD movies are available on disc, we may see Blu-Ray recorders as soon as the 2nd half […]

Note: for an in depth look at how Serial ATA really works, check out our companion story explaining the details. Product: Seagate ST3120023AS Web Site: www.seagate.com Pro: Surprisingly speedy — slightly better than the ATA version; less cable clutter; easy configuration. Con: Requires BIOS support or PCI host adapter; power adapter necessary; still slower than […]