HDD Accessory

iStarUSA BPU-350SATA Review

If you are into storage and servers, you may have thought about taking a crack at building your own. Just having a case large enough to home a ton of hard drives isn't enough to do the job right. Your drives need to be accessible. Think about it, you would have to take everything apart to replace or add a hard drive if they were just all stuffed in a case? That's nuts. In the interest of convenience and usability, products like hard drive hot-swap cages are nearly a necessity. Enter the iStarUSA BPU-350SATA hard drive cage

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iStarUSA BPU-124DE-SS Review

Having more than one hard drive in your PC not that uncommon for one reason or another. Sometimes, having access to those drives is just as important as having them. The days of locking your drives behind your case's side panel are gone, and products like SATA cages / backplane make accessing your drives easy. For me, having a number of 2.5" SSDs with varying operating systems fulfills my needs for testing, working, and playing. Instead of selecting which drive I want to run through the BIOS, I simply pop that drive in my SATA backplane and I am off and running. Recently our Vantec EZ Swap F4 MRK-425ST-BK 4 Bay HDD rack has decided that its 40mm fan would sound like a bicycle with a baseball card running through the spokes. Can iStarUSA's BPU-124DE-SS unseat our current hardware? Let's find out.

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ineo Protection Box

Sometimes the simplest products are actually great products. If you remember the good old days when people played tapes instead of CD's, you would remember the Cassette boxes they came in. The idea was simple, use the box if you didn't want to damage your cassette. These boxes weren't the “be all, end all” for protection, but they did an adequate job of protecting your tapes from accidental splashes and dust. In addition to that, they made organizing your collection easy because they were uniformly shaped even though our cassettes were oddly shaped. Hard drives are no different. They should get the same kind of love and attention that our beloved cassette tapes did in the 80's, but instead they are stacked on our shelves naked and lonely waiting for dust and coffee to find them. Fear not solution seekers, there is an answer! ineo (yes, that is a lowercase "i") has produced a simple hard drive protection box, but does it cut the mustard... or the cheese?

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Kingwin EZ-CONNECT USI-2535

As someone that is expected to fix everyone’s computer in my family, there is nothing more than “WOOT!” that can  be said about a product that makes my family obligations easier.  My family isn’t exactly the most “in touch” when it comes to computing (you will read an article / rant soon about that) and they make a bunch of …

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iStarUSA T-5 SS

My digital life is one that can be categorized as anything but stagnant. In my world, hardware changes as often as my underwear (well, not really… but close) and when products come along that may make things easier; I get excited. iStarUSA thinks they might have the answer to one of my problems. Enter the T-5 SS, a screw-less and …

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BPU-340SAS SATA/SAS Backplane RAID Cage

For many years, the role of a backplane was primarily in the server environment. With home computing and server environments becoming intertwined the roles of devices like this are becoming skewed. Backplanes are no longer just for SCA SCSI devices and are now being found more and more in other arenas as SCSI is no longer the king. SATA/SAS has taken the performance per dollar championship. iStarUSA thinks they might have the answer to the industry's needs with the BPU-340SAS RAID Cage.

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