Posts Tagged “usb”

While the world waits for Apple to release official news about their new tablet computer, a few smaller (and lesser known) companies are releasing their own touch screen tablets.  Archos has a few models out, there’s the viliv, and then there’s the whole CrunchPad thing which is now called the JooJoo.  And I’ve never played with any of them.  I have however been (for some reason) drooling for an iSlate for the past year or so.  And in my impatience I prematurely ordered a Camangi WebStation and am ready to report the bad news…

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Ok… Unfortunately I’m old enough to have lived through old Coke vs New Coke vs Classic Coke – which by the way isn’t the same as the old Coke. This might be just a matter of taste too, but I belive the original iPod Shuffle is still the best iPod Shuffle.  By now it’s quite obvious that Apple’s business model is to come out with new iPods every few months so that there’s always a new iPod that you’ll want to buy.  For most of their other iPod models the new ones generall are better than the old ones.  But I still have my original iPod shuffle and it still works great.  And while it doesn’t talk to me, it has some features that make it the best..

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One of the coolest little products I saw at CES was the Webbie HD camera from Sony. While I’m not a fan of the name (the manual calls it the Mobile HD Snap which is much better), this pocket sized tapeless cam shoots 30-frame HD video at either 720P or 1080P. It’s clearly targeted to those wanting to upload clips directly from the memory stick to YouTube. Even the name suggests that it captures web-quality video. But it DOES shoot in HD. So what’s the down side?  What’s the quality really like? Read… »

Continuing my series of reviewing every hard drive solution I’ve ever touched, I want to talk about the Vantec NexStar. Not only this particular hard drive dock but the general concept, the goods and bads about it, including some benchmarks.

I’ve always like the idea of the hard drive dock. Recently I needed to back up a massive amount of data and was on a tight budget to do it. I purchased 5 of these NexStar docks for about $35 $39 a piece, and a box of 1 TB hard drives. The dock works by plugging your favorite raw SATA drive right in to the top (like a Nintendo Cart). It has a power button on the front and USB and eSATA connections on the back. Vantec makes other versions, one with the addition of FireWire.  Mine performed very well. In practice, using the eSATA connection I was able to fill up a TB in about 3 hours. When I started having problems with my FreeAgent drive I did benchmarks on all of these solutions. Read… »

A few years ago I moved towards eSATA connectivity for drives.  SATA (or Serial ATA) is the connection that is on the actual drive and has blazing fast transfer speeds up to 3Gb/sec.  The concept is that whatever drive enclosure you buy has some sort of interface card that ‘converts’ SATA to USB or Firewire.  That’s the definition of a bandwidth bottleneck. Using SATA to SATA connectivity should eliminate any bottleneck and give you the full bandwidth of the drive.  eSATA is simply an external version of the SATA connector.  I’ll do more detailed explanations in later posts, but in general to use eSATA you need a PCI host adaptor card and a drive with an eSATA connection.

I was excited when the FreeAgent Pro came out because of the eSata connectivity.  I got a great deal and paid around 100 bucks at Fry’s for a 1TB model.  Every other article I’ve seen of the FreeAgent Pro drive gives it a rave review and claims that the 3Gb/sec is blazing fast.  It should be – but it’s not.  It’s also important to note that these reviewers probably never tested the eSATA connection for speed. They’re just quoting the Seagate data sheet – even using the same word to describe it.  If they actually tested it or benchmarked it they would report honestly on how the drive is actually performing. No single drive (today) performs at 3Gb/s because that is the maximum burst bandwidth of the drive interface.  In practice you’re average is going to max out at 1/4 – 1/3 that rate.

Seagate’s datasheet on the (now) FreeAgent Pro Classic has this to say: “It provides eSATA connectivity at blazing speeds up to 3Gb/sec, FireWire® 400 connectivity for Macs and digital video users, as well as USB 2.0 connectivity, the most commonly used interface in the world today.”

The drive seemed fine to me until I tried copying a large chunk of video files to it using the eSATA connection. A copy function that should have taken only an hour or so was claiming that it would take 30 hours! So I decided to start taking some benchmarks and get to the bottom of the problem. Read… »