SSD Torture TestYou may think you put your hardware through the wringer, but chances are you don't have anything on the folks at ioSafe. The company's CEO, Robb Moore, doesn't just say his drives can handle almost anything you throw at them (including fire or water), but he proves it with some truly dynamic demonstrations. For this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Moore and the ioSafe crew carted a small group of tech journalists and industry insiders to a restaurant parking lot on the edge of the Las Vegas city limits to show just how hardy the company's new ioSafe Solo SSD really is.According to a press release, the Solo SSD sports a military-grade steel covering called ArmorPlate, which can protect the drive inside from a two-story building colapse, 5,000 pounds of crush forces, a 20-foot drop into rubble, and up to a 1,000g shock. This, by the way, is in addition to the protection from fire (the drive can withstand flames of 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes) and fresh or salt water (it can be complete submersed at a depth of 30 feet for 30 days) Moore demonstrated last year. The Solo achieves its heatproof qualities thanks to gypsum-based insulation that contains water crystals that expand when heated to help the insulation keep out the heat.If all that's true and the ioSafe Solo SSD works as its makers claim, the drive's pricing—which ranges from $499 for 64GB of storage to $1,250 for 256GB—might be worth it for businesses or individuals who need or want truly heavy-duty data protection. (The drives are slated to ship in February.)So at the ioSafe test site, Moore and ioSafe Director of Business Development Tobias Kruse demonstrated all of the drive's protection features. Did the ioSafe Solo SSD—and its data—survive? [youtube=425,350]rGQutwml2RQ[/youtube]well what else can be happed to a poor HD lol (but its working thats all matter)
USB 3.0: Changing the Storage GameFrom my perspective, one of the most important and most overlooked trends at CES was the emergence of name-brand external drives that support the USB 3.0 or "Superspeed" specification. Effectively, this is a connection protocol that looks just like the USB 2.0 connections we're all familiar with, but it should let you transfer data to and from external drives three times faster than you can with USB 2.0 drives.Technically, USB 3.0 runs at 5 Gbps, compared with USB 2.0's 480 Mbps, so you would think it would be 10 times faster. But remember that those speeds are theoretical maximums, not what you see in the real world, because of the overhead in the way the protocol works. More important, when it comes to hard drives, the connection is no longer going to be the limit. The raw speed of the drive—how fast the platters rotate and how quickly the drive itself can read and write data—is going to be the limiting factor.The USB Implementers Forum has been working on USB 3.0 for years. I've been seeing demos of USB 3.0 for about a year and a half now, and the first few real products, mostly controllers and adapters, were heavily on display at last summer's Intel Developer Forum.What was different at CES was the appearance of three USB 3.0 hard drives that should be available to consumers imminently.For desktops, Western Digital showed a version of its MyBook, initially in a 1TB version (with a 2TB version coming soon). This is a 3.5-inch drive, and it will be available for $179.99 by itself or $199.99 with a USB 3.0 PCIe adapter card. And Buffalo Technologies introduced a version of its DriveStation desktop drive at $199.99 for the 1TB version, $249.99 for the 1.5TB version, and $399.99 for 2TB. It will require a $59.99 ExpressCard adapter.For laptops, Seagate showed a version of its business notebook drive, called the Black Armor PS110. This 500GB, 7,200-rpm drive comes with an ExpressCard USB 3.0 adapter for $179.99. The drive comes with AES 256-bit encryption. The company showed demos of the same drive attached via USB 2.0 showing reads at 32 MBps and writes at 24 MBps versus connected via USB 3.0 showing reads at 100 MBps and writes at 67 MBps. Seagate even showed a two-drive system using RAID Level 0 connected to USB 3.0 showing 217 MBps throughput. This works out to about 1.6 Gbps or about one-fourth of USB 3.0's rated speed.You'll note that these speeds are nowhere near the 5 Gbps speed that USB 3.0 is rated at. Again, that's because the drives themselves have become the gate. But it means that USB 3.0 should be fast enough so that FireWire or even eSATA connections become irrelevant in the future. (eSATA connections are also faster than current drives, but there are many more USB devices. It's possible there will be eSATA versions of the SATA 6GB standard, though that's mostly aimed at RAID configurations, where it will be quite useful.)USB 3.0 is backward-compatible, so you can plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 3.0 port or a USB 3.0 drive into a USB 2.0 port—of course, you'll then get only the slower performance. But the real problem now is a lack of USB 3.0 ports. You can buy a PCIe board for your desktop or an ExpressCard for your laptop (assuming you have the slot), and some new motherboards do support USB 3.0, but the technology is still far from commonplace.Still, it's really important because we all are getting more and more content, and backing it up is taking longer and longer. Taking the Seagate demo numbers, for instance, note that backing up 100GB of photos (a not unreasonable amount these days) would take about 71 minutes on a USB 2.0 drive and about 25 minutes on a USB 3.0 drive. That's still longer than I would like, but it's a big step in the right direction. And that's a bigger gain than you'll see with a change of processor, or in most cases, a change of graphics chips.
We are proud to present the EVGA Classified SR-2, the absolute ultimate for the extreme user. It takes everything that made the X58 Classified 4-way SLI motherboard great and doubled it up. Now you can experience the ultimate in overclocked multithreaded performance by way of Dual 1366 sockets which allow for hyper-threaded Intel Xeon CPU’s to be combined together for massive amounts of workload to be spread across a multitude of processing threads.When combined with compatible Intel 6 Core CPU’s, you create a massive system capable of up to 24 CPU threads of compute power. If you want future-proof, this is it!We have literally created a new form factor to fit all the amazing things on one board. Whether you are an extreme gamer, overclocker, power user, workstation user, server admin, folder/cruncher, or just a PC enthusiast; this is the ultimate motherboard. This board will encode your movies, render your images, or even load your games faster than you ever thought possible.
Now meet the 1200W SR-2 Power SupplyIn addition to the innovative EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard, EVGA will soon be offering the ultimate power solution. The EVGA Classified SR-2 Power Supply takes high performance power to the next level. Rated at 1200W, this baby can peak at over 1500W of output. With 6 +12v rails capable of putting out 38A a piece, it's clear why this is the ultimate of all power supplies. * Over 1500W Peak Power * 6 +12v rails rated at 38 amps each * Adjustable +12v Rail * Adjustable Fan speed * Perfect for the SR-2 Motherboard
Intel's Core i7-980X Extreme processorThe desktop's first six-core CPU would strike fear into the competition, if it had anyGuys, look at the 980X's Intel stock coolerRead the full article......http://techreport.com/articles.x/18581Further readinghttp://www.legitreviews.com/article/1245/20/http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3763&p=16http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=475&Itemid=63&limit=1&limitstart=12
VisionTek has released a souped-up gaming network card that could be worth buying for reasons other than performance. The Killer 2100, again based on Bigfoot Networks' reference design, is the latest in a line of NICs that purport to reduce latency and ping times while gaming. But the Killer 2100 also offers a bevy of useful software monitoring tools, and it rings in at a just-reduced price of $89.99. That's $40 less than its retail cost at launch just two months ago.Prior to receiving the Killer 2100, we had already reviewed three separate gaming NICs using designs from Bigfoot Networks, including the original Killer NIC (from 2006), the Killer K1 (2007), and the Killer Xeno Pro (2009). The last arrived with an impressive feature list and a rather high $130 price, but its test results were mixed at best. They were virtually indistinguishable from an integrated NIC except in specific, somewhat contrived scenarios.The Killer 2100 aims to change that, but the deck is still stacked against it. As is always the case with these cards, so many factors can get in the way of an objective test that it's difficult to see any extra performance in the real world. (We'll detail some of those issues later.) Just by virtue of that fact, most gamers don't need a card like this. But what about the truly hard-core gamers, the ones flush with cash and looking to optimize every last piece of their PC? For those folks, is this card worth the money? Let's find out.Essentially, you'd be buying the Killer 2100 to eliminate a variable, whether or not that variable needed to be eliminated. If you have a bloodlust enthusiast–level PC that costs around $3k, juicing up the NIC may be worth the $90. Even in that case, we'd skip the Killer 2100, and instead pop for a gigabit-class gaming router that can improve transfer times and latency for multiple PCs. A network performance fiend with a slot to spare and who wants the monitoring tools may enjoy the card. But we're still not seeing enough to recommend it as part of a typical PC build, even if you are a heavy online gamer.
