Reviews

If you are QNAP, what can you do next? You have already released some of the best NAS with some of the best features on the market, how do you top that? Well, QNAP thinks they have a good shot at targeting the home enthusiast with their latest lineup of NAS in the TS-x51 series. The TS-451 is the 4 bay variant in the product family and offers a powerful CPU, upgradeable RAM, transcoding capabilities, and some new looks.

My days of large full tower cases are slowly coming to an end. Although I love the behemoths of yesteryear, I see myself starting to look upon Mini-ITX motherboards and cases with more enthusiasm every day. I can get everything I want and need in a compact platform without sacrificing CPU and video card power. This transition seems to have been born from the latest round of case reviews that have been featured here lately. We have featured SilverStone, Fractal Design, Lian-Li and iStarUSA cases on the site but one company wasn't feeling any love and promised me they could sway me from the others with their latest Mini-ITX case. I have to admit, the competition is rough, but Antec feels as though their ISK600 is the case that steals the thunder.

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

There is seldom a time when I get more excited than when someone ships me a case designed specifically for storage. SliverStone told me they would be producing something that would get my fingers twitching in anticipation, and for the last couple of months it sat in a dark corner waiting for the day when I could break it open. Lonely and afraid, the SilverStone DS380 SFF NAS chassis waited, waited for its chance to woo me.

I am always on the verge of pulling the trigger when it comes to purchasing a new motherboard. However, the dollar spent to performance gained ratio plays out like a bad commercial in my head. These days, motherboards are becoming more expensive and really aren't offering too much in the way of shiny new features. Sure, they look cool... but do they really offer you anything over your current mobo? Simple answer... Yes... and no. Enter the ASUS Z97-AR motherboard.

There is nothing like the feel and the sound of a good quality mechanical keyboard. A little background, I guess you would call me an old school gamer. I came from the "good ol'e days" when CRT monitors occupied half of your desk, processors were clocked in MHz, keyboards were PS/2, water cooling wasn't sold in kits, and clans were ranked on N.A.T.O. Everyone I knew had mechanical keyboards, I guess we were spoiled back then. Well, the good ol'e days are back... to an extent. New gamers are on the hunt for a good mechanical keyboard and there are a handful of manufacturers out there that are charging premium prices for the types of keyboards we threw away.

Crucial, the company that impressed us with their M4 series SSD, has expanded their SSD portfolio with a low cost, high performance, MX100 series drive. Their claims of "unrelenting performance" combined with low cost per GB is an attractive marketing campaign. Extreme Energy Efficiency, Adaptive Thermal Protection, and Power Loss Protection mark some of the Crucial benefits on the product page. With all this marketing fluff, the real question is... how does this budget SSD stack up when it comes to spending your hard earned cash?

If you are a road warrior, then you know having only a few GB of space on your mobile device is a complete bummer. Instead of shelling out hundreds more for a device with a few extra GB, what if there was an inexpensive solution that could expand your space to TB instead of just GB. What if I told you that your 16GB iPad or 8GB Samsung could now store up to 1TB of music, movies, photos, documents and more? Well, LaCie thinks they have the answer to your storage needs and they think that their solution, the LaCie Fuel, is the one that should earn your money.

Can you think of a NAS worth buying that costs less than $150.00 USD? I bet you would have a hard time answering that question. I have reviewed a slew of NAS and can't answer that question, until now. Thecus has done what many have considered as the impossible. They may have just set a new standard for affordability, slapped the Thecus badge on it, and dubbed it the N2310.

Have you heard of RAPID? That is the question you need to be asking yourself if you have purchased a Samsung SSD recently. Aside from the speedy little SSD you get in the package, Samsung has a cool trick up their sleeve and it goes by the name of RAPID, or Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data. What is it? And, does it work?