Maximum PC 2009 RSS Feed

eSATA Speeds?

The Maximum PC Staff — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:00:00 -0600

I have an HP HDX18T laptop with an external drive that holds my old stock 250GB/5,400rpm 2.5-inch drive. The external case uses an internal SATA connection and has both a USB 2.0 and eSATA connection externally for my laptop. I’ve read that there is a theoretical transfer rate of 4GB/s with eSATA, but I’m lucky to get 40MB/s copying to or from. Can you tell me what I’m missing? BTW, the external drive case is an Eagle ET-CS2PESU2-BK.

—James Lamar

James, eSATA has a maximum throughput of 3Gb/s. That’s gigabits, though, not gigabytes. So, figure around 300MB/s, less overhead. However, you won’t see many mechanical hard drives actually reach those speeds—the fastest consumer-level hard drives barely get 200MB/s sustained read speeds, and a 250GB/5,400rpm drive doesn’t even approach that. You’re constrained in this case not by the transfer speeds of the eSATA connection, but by the mechanical speed of your hard drive. Especially if you have an older drive, 40MB/s sounds pretty reasonable for a 5,400rpm device. But look on the bright side: It’s still faster than you’ll get using the USB 2.0 interface.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has fizzled, email the doctor at doctor@maximumpc.com for advice on how to solve your technological woes.

Holiday 2009: How to Get Free

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:13:15 -0600

In the PDF archive of the Holiday 2009 issue you can find:

How to Get Free Programs, Services, Software, Apps & More
8 Photo-printing Solutions Compared
Interview with Cryptic Studios' Craig Zinkievich about Star Trek Online
Awesome Product Reviews, including the Thermaltake Level 10 case
Ask the Doctor
Best of the Best
How-to: DIY Arcade PC
And a whole lot more!

Click the big giant cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

Soundcard Interface Woes

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:15:12 -0600

I have a problem with my X-Fi Platinum setup. It worked fine on my old Dell 8200, but I recently upgraded my mobo to an EVGA nForce 780i and now the front ports don’t seem to work. What gives? I reinstalled the drivers several times and nothing. The main card works just fine, but the drive bay interface is the whole reason I bought the card in the first place.

—Rocco Nicoletta

Since the card works with the rear ports for both output and input, the Doctor is going to assume it’s something as simple as a loose connection or damaged cable that occurred during the motherboard move. You should power down and unplug your system. Open the side up and find the ribbon cable that goes from the I/O front panel to the X-Fi Platinum. Those old ribbon cables are easy to mess up and plug in incorrectly. Unplug it on both ends and then reconnect, making sure you have firmly plugged into the card and the auxiliary panel. Also, make sure you have the front panel’s four-pin power connector (the same as a floppy drive’s) plugged into the PSU.

Clogged Pipes

The Maximum PC Staff — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:45:30 -0600

I just bought a used PC running Windows XP. It had been really fast loading and running programs and accessing the web, but suddenly it slowed down to a complete stop. I had to unplug it just to shut it down.

So, I unplugged the Ethernet cable and it worked fine. I scanned the C: drive—no virus. Plugged the Ethernet cable back in and it slowed down again. Unplugged the Ethernet and it’s fast again. What’s going on, Doc?

—Tim

That’s definitely suspicious behavior, Tim. It sounds like something is trying to send or receive lots of data, and we don’t like it when programs do that without our explicit consent. You’re likely either the victim of some bizarre Denial of Service attack or you’re the victim of some sort of virus or other malware, even if you’re not detecting anything. It’s always good to do a clean install of Windows on an upgraded or new-to-you PC. Make sure you’re running both a firewall and antivirus software. Short of that, our Ultimate Malware Removal Guide can help you root out any nasties that might be responsible for this egregious behavior.

How Full is Too Full?

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:15:19 -0600

I’ve often heard the rumor that a full hard drive is significantly slower than a mostly empty one. Despite my black belt Google-fu I am unable to find any stories, articles, or write-ups to elaborate on this. How much slower? At which point is a hard drive too full—60 percent? 90? When should I start looking for a bigger drive?

—David Seber

The more data that’s on a hard drive, the easier it is for the drive to become highly fragmented, which can make accessing your data take longer. You also need to keep a certain level of free space on your drive to accommodate temporary files and virtual memory—not enough, and your system can slow to a crawl. Our general rule of thumb is to defragment mechanical hard drives regularly, run trash-collection (e.g., TRIM) on your SSDs, and keep at least 10 percent or 20GB—whichever is less—of your drive’s space free at all times.

December 2009: Make Windows Soar!

The Maximum PC Staff — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:53:18 -0600

In the PDF archive of the December 2009 issue you can find:

29 XP, Vista & Win7 Tips to Customize Your OS
Radeon HD 5870 Examined
LCD Monitor Roundup
Awesome Product Reviews, including Western Digital's 2TB Caviar Black
Ask the Doctor
Best of the Best
How-to: 3 Photoshop Tutorials
And a whole lot more!

Click the big giant cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

Synology DS409+ NAS

Nathan Edwards — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:00:00 -0600

Powerful and feature-rich, but not for newbs

The Synology DS409+, though targeted at small- and medium-size business owners, is a great addition to any home network, with a robust web admin panel, media streaming of all stripes, cross-platform support, and easy backup—of the computers on your network, and of the NAS itself. To call this merely “network-attached storage” does the device a disservice.

The DS409+ is a squat brown-black box with a minimalist feel, and it ships sans drives, so you’ll have to provide your own. The ports are on the back of the device and include two USB 2.0, one eSATA, and one Gigabit Ethernet. In addition to two 8cm fans, the hinged back panel contains four thumbscrews, which, once unscrewed, allow the panel to open and the top of the case to lift off. The DS409+’s four hard drive trays accommodate 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives, which must be screwed into the trays and slotted into the NAS box’s SATA backplane. The DS409+ can be configured with up to 8TB of storage; we tested ours with four 750GB Samsung Spinpoint HD753LJ 7,200rpm hard drives in RAID 5, making a 2TB volume. (The DS409+ also supports JBOD and RAID levels 0, 1, 5 + spare, and 6.)

The staid exterior of the Synology DS409+ belies its feature-packed but slightly obtuse web interface.

With its 1.06GHz Freescale CPU and 512MB of RAM, the DS409+ turned in excellent performance. We transferred a 2.79GB file from our PC to the NAS in just a minute and a half, and from the NAS to the PC in 60 seconds; 600MB of smaller files took just 22 seconds to copy to the NAS, and 18 seconds the other way. That’s better performance than Seagate’s BlackArmor 440 (reviewed in August), which has a higher-clock processor but half the RAM of the Synology.

The web administration panel is incredibly full-featured—and slightly daunting. Admins can see at-a-glance data on disk usage, S.M.A.R.T. hard drive diagnostics, user quotas and permissions, and the status of network services. And oh, the services! In addition to the by-now-standard fare of iTunes and DLNA/UPnP media streaming, the updated firmware lets the DS409+ act as a web server, hosting PHP and MySQL databases, an FTP server, and a mail server. The DS409+ also supports terminal access via telnet/ssh. One of our favorite features, AudioStation, can stream your music library to any computer, iPhone, or Windows Mobile smartphone. Or the DS409+ itself can act as a jukebox if you connect it to a set of USB speakers. PhotoStation does the same for photos. Surveillance Station acts as a control panel for your networked webcams; Download Station lets you schedule BitTorrent, FTP, RapidShare, and other P2P downloads—you get the idea. The included Data Replicator 3 software lets users back up their local machines to their private folders on the NAS.

The DS409+’s web interface gives you a satisfying amount of control over a dizzying array of features, and though it’s not very user-friendly, we can’t complain about a lack of amenities. It’d be nice if the drives were more accessible—we liked the front-mounted hot-swap bays on the Seagate BlackArmor 440—and $550 is steep for a device that ships without drives. Ultimately, though, the DS409+ is a powerful and speedy NAS device that is just as appealing to the home networker as to the SMB owner, and we don’t hesitate to recommend it.

Trendnet TEW-639GR Wireless Router

Michael Brown — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:30:59 -0600

Fast, cheap, and in control

Trendnet’s TEW-639GR 802.11n router is an ugly duckling that will never grow into a beautiful swan. It also just happens to be the fastest router we’ve tested in some time. It performs well at range, includes a Gigabit Ethernet switch, and with an $80 street price, it’s cheap, too!

The three external antennae aren’t to blame for this router’s homeliness—in fact, we welcome that design choice if it accounts for the router’s excellent performance. Rather, it’s the ultra-cheap plastic shell and the glowing indicator light that screams “wireless router!” like the vacancy sign at a no-tell motel that make this device look so cheesy.

The Trendnet TEW-639GR might look like a cheap tart, but there's a heart of gold beneath that garish plastic.

Before we dive into a discussion of what this router can do, let’s cover any limitations that might be deal-breakers for you. This is a single-band router that operates on the 2.4GHz frequency band only, so if your air space is crowded with other people’s APs or you’re looking for a router to pair with your dual-band media streamer, look elsewhere. Likewise if you’re using a VoIP device, since the router’s quality-of-service features are limited to enabling Wi-Fi Multimedia. Lastly, Trendnet didn’t outfit the TEW-639GR with a USB port, so you can’t set it up to function as network attached storage or use it to share a printer over your network.

But if you’re looking for fast wireless throughput on the cheap, the TEW-639GR offers an excellent price/performance ratio. With channel bonding enabled, we achieved TCP/IP throughput of 96.4Mb/s in our kitchen test, where the client is 20 feet from the router and separated by an insulated wall and a set of plywood cabinets. That’s slightly faster than our longtime champion, the Linksys WRT-600N, which managed throughput of 95.2Mb/s. The Trendnet couldn’t beat the Linksys when it came to reaching the client PC in our isolated media room, but it came close, delivering TCP/IP throughput of 23.9Mb/s, compared to the Linksys’s 29.6Mb/s. The challenger pummeled the champ in our long-range performance, though, with the Trendnet achieving throughput several times faster than the Linksys when the
client was placed outdoors.

Trendnet’s TEW-639GR doesn’t offer enough advanced features to earn a spot on our Best of the Best list, but it is a solid performer with an attractive price tag and definitely worthy of consideration.