20 PCs FROM ANOTHER WORLD

 

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times: The reason why desktop Linux hasn't made it is because of its lack of games. Thanks to Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve and its Steam game platform, that's not true anymore.

         

WD Black2 Dual Drive

Manufacturer: Western Digital
UK Price: £234
US Price: $299

On the surface, Western Digital’s WD Black2 Dual Drive (WD1001X06XDTL) appears to be simply yet another version of the same hybrid storage idea that’s been floating around for a few years now: have a small SSD for fast access backed up by a large HDD, all in the same package. However, the trick to WD’s latest product is that instead of using the SSD as an invisible, high-speed cache here the two are kept separate. In one drive you literally get a 120GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive.

What’s the advantage of this? Well, first and foremost, most hybrid drives have only 4-8GB of cache whereas the Black2 has a full 120GB. It also means you get to decide what data goes on which drive and you get the performance of an SSD at all times. For instance on a hybrid drive overall transfer speeds are little better than a standard 5,400rpm hard drive because the cache is already full of all your most used programs. With the Black^2, though, you can read and write to the SSD at full pelt. All told, it should theoretically be the ideal speed and capacity upgrade for a laptop or small form factor system.


Retailing for a hefty ~£230, this drive clearly carries a premium over the cost of buying both a 1TB HDD and a 120GB SSD, so is heavily reliant on selling the message of convenience and, ultimately, being the only solution out there to offer what it does.

Acknowledging this premium price, Western Digital presents the Black2 Dual Drive in a very fancy box with a magnetic clasp and an extra outer sleeve. Inside is a hefty printed quick install manual, a comically oversized USB drive with the installation software (you can also just download it from the WD website) and there’s also a USB 3.0 to SATA cable included, for easily transferring files across before physically swapping your drives.


The drive itself is also rather more tarted up than your average hard drive. On its top a gold logo is painted on a glossy black plastic cover which is actually the backside of the SSD’s PCB sprayed black. The effect with the PCB traces marked out on the surface is rather funky.

Flip the drive over and we can see that the inclusion of an SSD has created quite a complicated front section to this drive. The SSD is sandwiched between the top surface and the metal bulk of the hard drive, with the hard drive PCB on the underside. Three screws are used to hold this front section of the SSD PCB in place but a rather less tinkering-friendly sticky foam is used to fix the rest of it to the back of the hard drive, making it too risky an operation to dismantle for photography. Essentially, though, it’s pretty clear Western Digital has really had to work to pack in all that tech.


The drive is a standard 9.5mm model which should fit all SFF systems and the vast majority of laptops, though some slim laptops use 7mm drives so be sure to check before taking the plunge.

Installation of the drive is the same as any other hard drive but until you’ve installed the Windows-only Dual Drive driver only the SSD will show up. Once the software is installed the HDD will appear as another partition. The utility works whether the drive is a primary or secondary drive though the HDD portion doesn’t work if connected over USB, so only your ‘boot data’ can be copied over before an upgrade when using a laptop (unless you connect both drives to another PC of course).

That really is it for features: this upgrade is all about its performance, so let's see how it stacks up.

Fresh from its acquisition by Toshiba, the formerly bankrupt OCZ has announced a family of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) with which it hopes to make its new owner proud.

When OCZ Technologies filed for bankruptcy protection late last year, there were concerns it would prove the end of the company. Thankfully, Toshiba stepped in with an offer the buy substantially all assets of the company, a plan which completed earlier this week with Toshiba spinning the acquisition off as OCZ Storage Solutions, a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Even while OCZ was technically bankrupt, it kept announcing new products - and it's celebrated its deal with Toshiba with the announcement of a new family of SSDs dubbed the Vertex 460 Series. Designed to replace the Vertex 450 Series, the new drives move to a 19nm process node MLC NAND flash from the 20nm of their predecessors, and include an in-house Barefoot 3 M10 controller. The result, OCZ claims, is up to 545MB/s sequential read and 525MB/s sequential write from the SATA-III interface.

The drivers are to launch in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities, come with a three-year warranty - one that now has Toshiba's backing, of course - and include retail packaging with a bundled 2.5"-to-3.5" desktop adapter and a copy of Acronis True Image to clone the contents of an existing drive over onto the SSD. UK pricing for the drives has yet to be confirmed, but an early listing on retailer Kikatek has the 120GB model priced at just under £77.

Amazon knows a lot about retail, but that’s knowledge is mostly confined to the online world right now. Reports indicate that the company is working on a new initiative that would see it expand its presence into brick-and-mortar retail, but not in the way you might expect. Amazon is working on a plan to get Kindle tablets in the hands of retailers to use as point-of-sale devices.

Storage giant Seagate has pledged to launch a desktop hard drive with a capacity of 6TB in the second quarter of this year, in an attempt to catch up to rival Western Digital.

Western Digital's HGST division - previously Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - became the first manufacturer to offer a single standard form-factor 3.5" hard drive offering a whopping 6TB capacity in November last year. The surprising jump in capacity came thanks to a novel manufacturing technique which replaces the air normally found inside a hard drive with helium in order to reduce drag - allowing for a seven-platter spinning-rust storage device that just about crams into a standard hard drive bay.

Now, Seagate has pledged to match that but with a more sedate six-platter layout - and to launch the device by the end of the second quarter. 'We are continuing to expand our offering of high capacity drives,' Seagate chief executive Steve Luczo told investors and press during the company's most recent earnings call, 'with our six-disk, 6TB drive shipping early next quarter.'

Luczo was, however, silent on how the company has managed to add an extra platter to its drives' design without taking a leaf from Hitachi's book and using a novel gas for its interior. The company has, however, confirmed that the drives will be based around perpendicular magnetic recording and be of the same design as the company uses in its existing 1TB-per-platter storage offerings.

Sadly for those hoping that the launch will lead to a high-capacity price war, Luczo noted that the first 6TB drives will be aimed firmly at the enterprise storage market - meaning it could be a while before prices drop to the level of the enthusiast's pocket.

If you build a new PC in 2014, chances are you’ll end up installing three types of storage inside: RAM, SSDs, and hard drives. RAM is the fastest, but wont retain its data without power, SSDs beat out hard drives on speed but is price-limited on storage size, and hard drives give you terabytes of space at very affordable prices, but they are slow.
That transition to using faster, and currently more expensive flash memory has been going on for a number of years now and is set to continue, but it goes well beyond the consumer market. Enterprise computing is also experimenting heavily with flash memory, with the latest company to embrace it being IBM who put 12TB of flash memory inside a server. The reason: the huge performance gains being realized by doing so.
Now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is using flash storage to revolutionize the so-called “Big Data” industry. We’re talking systems that have to cope with massive amounts of data, like the University of Washington’s universe simulation, which requires gigabytes of data be passed around a network in order to function.



Doing such work using existing systems requires thousands of hard drives all linked together and accessed over an Ethernet network. It works, but it’s relatively slow. A hard drive typically has an access time measured in milliseconds, where as flash memory cuts that to microseconds.
Even if you switch out the hard drives for flash storage, you are still limited by the Ethernet network that connects them all together. You get a performance increase for sure, but it’s still slow, and by no means real-time.
A team at CSAIL believes it has come up with a solution to this problem and in the process created a real-time data storage system. It’s called the Blue Database Machine, or BlueDM, and the key to its speed is a combination of flash storage, programmable FPGA chips, and a serial network connecting the nodes together.
What the team did was to create a node consisting of flash memory connected to an FPGA. By doing that the node not only has very fast storage, it gains the ability to do some local processing on the data stored there using the FPGA. That’s much faster than sending the data to a central computer to be processed.
Nodes can also be linked together to form large networks, and by using a high performance serial network, communication between the nodes is measured in nanoseconds. The end result is a network of storage and processing power that allows real-time access to data while remaining highly scalable.
CSAIL has been working out the kinks in BlueDM using a 4-node network built using 5-year-old hardware. A new 16-node prototype should demonstrate the true potential of the system, though, which is expected to have 32 terabytes of storage and nodes operating at 3 gigabytes per second.
The BlueDM is prototype is expected to make an appearance at FPGA 2014 symposium being held in California on February 26-28.

Now a day’s From Nvidia Gtx 750 Ti, Gtx Titan Black Edition and Gtx 790 is the eye catching candies. The Gtx 750 Ti would be the Maxwell First Card and Gtx Titan Black Edition is based on Gk110 Core and Gtx 790 on Dual Gk-110. The Asus Gtx 790 is revealed, the Russian Electricity supplier has come with the card on their website for pre-order. There was a rumor about the specification of Gtx 790 which we covered in our previous articles


The Gtx 790 based on Outdated you can say after Maxwell but Two Full Gk110 Core with 4992 Stream Processors, 2×320 Bit core memory, It is the first 320bit card from Nvidia with 10Gb of VRam with the thermal power design of 300W.



The Picture from Russian Website, this is the ASUS Gtx 790 6Gb DDR5, the 6GD5 clearly tell us the VRAM of 6Gb, the 10Gb memory is for workstations, but the memory interference will be the 384 bits. If we talk about price 48,470 Russian Ruble, which is almost equal to $1400 Amercian Dollor, the price seems a little high at this stage when Maxwell architecture cards are also on the way.

Recently update of Opteron Series, Bulldozer Third Version “Roller” and AMD APUs Kaveri the mix of GCN GPU all the new stuff is from AMD and what about theoretical performance? AnandTech recently comes with the Peak Floating Point Performance of Intel Haswell, Ivy