InWin With a Twist…
One of my very first cases was an InWin, and even then, I only bought it because it was huge honking and on sale. Recently, InWin has been trying hard to break out of that mould of “Generic Case” manufacturer. Although I saw lots of evidence of that at their booth, nothing convinced me more than this product…
I seem to have developed an allergic reaction to hard drive enclosures. They’re like a generic plague these days. That’s why when something different comes along, I take notice. InWin showed off something pretty cool in a hard drive enclosure that I’ve dubbed the “Bento Box”. This product does double duty as a storage device for data when you load it with a hard drive, but also for your desktop items like office supplies. The design also looks pretty good on your desk with the goldfish motif. How very Feng Shui.
Sans Digital in the “Why Didn’t Someone Think of This Sooner?” Category
There are so many ways to differentiate hard drive enclosures. InWin’s unique “Bento Box” is one way and Raid 0 performance is another. The only problem is that you can’t have performance and redundancy at the same time with most dual drive enclosures. SANS Digital seems to have figured that one out…
Their new MobileSTOR MS2UT+B dual drive enclosures not only support your usual connections (USB 2.0/eSATA), but they’ve solved the problem of performance versus security by introducing something called SAFE 33 and SAFE 50. Combining the performance of RAID 0 with the redundancy of RAID 1, this enclosure will either reserve 33% or 50% of the capacity for mirroring activity, while leaving the rest of the drive wide open for RAID 0 performance. Early warning systems let you know when a drive will go south via the LCD so that you can swap it out in time.
Since Solid State Drives are all the rage, SANS Digital has also developed a new dual CF Card 2.5 inch enclosure that takes advantage of RAID 1 for security while giving you a low cost alternative to regular SSD drives through the use of readily available and cheap CF cards up to 32 GBs. Since CF cards have a certain number of write cycles before they are toast, this drive’s mirroring function not only backs up your data simultaneously, but an early warning system lets you know when a card is going south so you can swap it before disaster happens.
Z for ZOTAC and G for Graphics Cards
ZOTAC is pretty new to the North American market, but they sure had a huge honking booth at COMPUTEX, which means business is good over here. At their booth, they showed off something interesting for those high performance users.
Instead of factory overclocking something and charging a premium for something you could pretty much do with any stock card, out of the box, ZOTAC built some value into their offering. For the premium price you pay for most pre-overclocked cards on the market, ZOTAC decided to include a watercooling system which was co-developed with help from CoolerMaster.
This watercooled 9800GTX graphics card gives you everything you need to push it while giving you the warm fuzzy feeling that you actually paid for something worthwhile. Not to mention, with a watercooling system attached, you can easily take this higher than some of the overpriced pre-overclocked variants on the market. Way to go ZOTAC.
That’s all from COMPUTEX 2008 in Taipei. See you all again next year for COMPUTEX 2009 and of course, more exciting new products and treasures from the show where stuff is sometimes so new, you might not see it in production till next year.
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