Maximum PC david RSS Feed

Western Digital Velociraptor

David Murphy — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:13:59 -0500

We've taken a look at engineering samples of Western Digital’s speedy new Velociraptor drive. Now that we have our hands on a final version of the drive, we’re ready to deliver a full review of the big beast itself. And not surprisingly, it’s every bit as fast as we anticipated.

This 300GB drive is made up of two 150GB platters that spin around at 10,000 RPM—the signature speed of the Raptor line. Western Digital is able to hit unprecedented speeds for a consumer-level drive this time around by shrinking the Velociraptor’s size to a 2.5-inch design. This reduces the size of the platters in turn, resulting in increased read and write speeds compared to a typical 3.5-inch storage device.

We saw excellent performance when running the Velociraptor through our synthetic and real-world storage benchmarks. The former had the Velociraptor pushing average read and write speeds of 108.4 MB/s and 100 MB/s, respectively. And the latter, represented by our PCMark05 benchmark, netted the Velociraptor a score 18 percent faster than our former speed demon, Samsung’s three-platter HD103UJ terabyte drive. Hands down, the Velociraptor is the quickest drive we’ve ever tested.

But it’s not perfect.

Western Digital has told us that the Velociraptor—at least, this version—is not a notebook drive. It’s designed strictly for desktop and enterprise environments, hence the large, black heatsink that supports the 2.5-inch drive. This is the Velociraptor’s thermal-padded "IcePak." It's a name given rather unnecessarily, as the drive portion of the Veloricaptor package actually feels cooler to the touch than most hard drives we’ve tested.

The IcePak doubles as a mounting mechanism to make the Velociraptor fit snugly within a case’s standard 3.5-inch drive bay. What doesn’t work with this drive, however, are hot-swapping mechanisms, like those found in a number of NAS boxes, external enclosures, and next-generation cases. And this isn’t a “wiggle it” version of not-working. The Velociraptor is incompatible with any configuration that requires you to slide the drive into fixed power and SATA connectors.

It’s a maddening issue that could have been easily fixed by, say, moving the 2.5-inch drive over a wee bit in the proper direction in the IcePak carriage. And although shifting the drive's positioning would invalidate the IcePak's supposed effectiveness, it's a trade-off we’re perfectly happy to make in order to be able to use the Velociraptor with a number of devices that it, being a hard drive, should fit. What good are killer speeds if you can’t even use them?

Western Digital My Passport Elite

David Murphy — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:29:22 -0500

Here we go again: Western Digital has launched yet another line of portable USB hard drives. The four drives in the My Passport Elite series don’t vary by size, just color. You’re free to select a capacity of 250GB or 320GB in gunmetal gray, old-shoe brown, a soft blue finish, or a sandy red. And as far as we can tell, that’s one of the few differences between this line of devices and Western Digital’s “normal” My Passport Essential drives—the latter having 11 different colors and four different capacity points to choose from.

The 320GB My Passport Elite drive performs nearly identically to its 250GB My Passport Essential cousin. The two are so neck-and-neck in our real-world benchmark that it would be silly to award the Elite major accolades for churning out a PCMark05 score that’s only 30 points ahead. Both of these drives completely fill the USB pipeline--they're the fastest we've seen, but at this point in portable storage, a number of drives are hitting up against this throughput wall. Rest assured, you’ll see no discernable difference between file transfers on an Elite-branded drive versus an Essential drive.

The Elite’s significant difference is that it comes bundled with MioNet, a handy little program that allows you to remote-access the various computers it’s installed on via a single software interface. Gone are the days of having to fire up VNC connections and finagle IP addresses. MioNet makes file-sharing but one word: easy. It’s a great solution for those who want to be able to access their files without having to continually copy up-to-the-minute chunks of a hard drive to the portable device.

While we appreciate the other software bundled on the My Passport Elite, it’s the same-ol’ same-ol’ that we’ve seen from Western Digital for awhile now. The WD Sync utility lets you access your documents, settings, and Outlook files on multiple computers when you plug in your optical drive. It's extremely handy if you regularly use multiple computers, but this software also comes with Essential drives--where's the innovation, Western Digital? On the backup front, the drive's Anywhere Backup application is showing its age: we can name a number of freeware applications that offer increased functionality with less graphical annoyances.

Another major downside with the My Passport Elite is the sheer number of applications it dumps on your system with a standard installation. After we installed all the drive’s bells and whistles, we were left with three auto-loading applications on startup—MioNet, WD Sync, and WD Anywhere Backup. That’s a bit much for a single drive, and makes us wonder why Western Digital just doesn’t consolidate the features of its programs into a single application. It would be a far more elegant solution than the current approach: firing up each program’s interface to see if this, that, or the other was the backup solution we were thinking of.

The Elder Scrolls: Crysis

David Murphy — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:27:42 -0500

Alas, unlike virtually every other blog post I've written as of late, this one isn't going to be epic. Or, rather, epically long. I'm busy reviewing a ton of cases this week, so I don't have time for one of my monster, 1,000+ word trips down blog lane. That said, I did want to put up something real quick-style about some of the "Maximum PC-style Awesome" web fun I've been checking out today.

If you're a fan of either the Elder Scrolls series or Crysis (these two games should encompass at least 94% of PC gamers' interests, I wager), you'll want to check this video out. A modder named Salenger has recreated the Oblivion landscape using CryEngine 2. In short, it looks beautiful. I would love--absolutely love--to see Bethesda experiment with this kind of quality for future Elder Scrolls titles. Save for the rumored MMO, that is. Given that both Oblivion and Crysis were (or are) considered system-punishing game at the time of their respective releases, I venture that CryEngine 2-based Elder Scrolls MMO... would be playable by four to five people worldwide.

But I digress. Should I start up the online petition for a remake of Daggerfall in the Crysis engine, or will one of you beat me to it? What other old-school games deserve some retrofit treatment?

UPDATE

Crytek has told Salenger to keep his modding to himself, and in return, it appears Salenger has nuked any and all links to his work! That said, we've found a mirror of the video previously featured. Check it out, while it lasts! Full text of the quasi-cease-and-desist below the video!

FROM THE CRYTEK MODS:

Greetings,

Today I do have a sad news for you guys. Unfortunately I have to completely lock the thread and ask the creator Salenger neither to not post the further progress on his imports, nor to release the whole project since it is a clear copyright infringement.

Due to the massive advert on that news that happened during the last days on digg.com and other editorial sites, we do not want to emphasize this kind of work. I completely understand you guys didn't mean anything bad when supporting his work, but that topic has gone a bit too far into the public section.

Please respect the work fo each developer and try to realize your own creations based on your favourite game rather than just porting assets from one game into another.

Thank you for your understanding.

-alex

__________________
Alexander Marschal
Crytek Community Manager

Cooler Master Cosmos

David Murphy — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:40:32 -0500

Consider this month’s batch of case reviews to be a second chance of sorts, as both companies highlighted this month have previously built total clunkers. Cooler Master threw down the iTower 930 in February, which was the functional equivalent of bringing a wiffle bat to a gunfight. And NZXT troubled us with the Adamas—which sported a relatively mediocre design when stacked up against its competitors.

We tipped our reviewing hand when we chose this case to house last month’s Dream Machine. But that’s just how sweet the Cosmos is. This case looks as good as it functions, and there’s nary a blemish in either area. More important, the case retains enough of a unique look and feel to distance itself from the bevy of generic models we frequently see.

You don’t need to grab a screwdriver to make major changes to any parts in the Cosmos case (aside from the motherboard). The five front 5.25-inch bays use an awesome push-button locking mechanism that, to date, is the best we’ve come across. Tiny thumbscrews hold the six hard-drive trays in place—an elegant improvement over standard drive bays.

The Cosmos caters to the water-cooling crowd with its ready-for-a-radiator ceiling grills, but lovers of the air won’t be left out. A detachable 12cm fan bunker pulls in air from the bottom of the case, and a plastic bar running horizontally across the case draws cool air right into the videocard area. Strangely, there’s no airflow across the hard drives in this case, one of the very few oversights we were able to find with the Cosmos.

A lack of functioning drive-activity lights on the case’s front panel is another stinger, but it’s not enough to destroy the taste of this sweet, sweet chassis.

BioShock? Innovative? You're Just Obeying the Hype

<a href="/david_murphy">David Murphy</a> — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 22:23:43 -0500

We've all read the writing on the subterranean walls. Reviewers around the world are praising the story of Rapture almost as much as BioShock's chief architect, Andrew Ryan. And like the various journals that permeate the game's underwater world, every bit of copy written about BioShock seems to trump those preceding it. It's as if the very genre of video gaming has been rocked to its core. Statements like "no matter how much you think you are prepared for this game… you aren’t" are just the generic way reviewers are phrasing it.

Read the reviews, and you'll find something more comparable to this: "[BioShock] is a beacon. It's one of those monumental experiences you'll never forget, and the benchmark against which games for years to come will, and indeed must, be measured."

You'll know you've hit the jackpot if you get the sense that said reviewer is blue in the face, having held his breath throughout the entirety of the BioShock experience. It's apparent in this example: "When confronted by a masterpiece of this magnitude -- a game that is almost more of a quest of self-discovery than a mere plaything -- it's impossible to not recognize the brilliance flooding your senses."

Really though? BioShock?

Because I like to maintain the illusion of a social life as much as possible, I only managed to finish BioShock last night. I've been playing it rather religiously since its August 21 launch date. While Jack may have powers, doo-dads, and weapons up the virtual wazoo, real-life Dave has yet to find the Plasmid (power-up, for the uninitiated) that lets him add additional hours to the day. The game's storyline is enough to carry it into the 2007 Hall of Gaming Distinction; I have no argument against that. The journals, the cutscenes, the dialogue -- everything sucked me in and, to BioShock's credit, even managed to pull me away from other games I've been obsessing over.

I'm playing these examples up a little more than I normally would on purpose. I love BioShock's story the same way I drooled over Max Payne. In fact, both games share a similar writing style -- the moral ambiguity of noir fits well with the sense of personal entitlement and ethical quandaries in the 1960s Rapture universe. But only one of those two games is rightly innovative, and I'll give you a clue: it's not BioShock.

I like to run with the dictionary definition of "innovative" when I'm talking about these sorts of things. Innovative, to Mister Webster, describes something that is "a new idea, method, or device." Fire was innovative because, prior to fire, mankind had no recourse for cold nights or cooking. A deep-fried Oreo cookie is innovative because it takes two amazing concepts beautiful in their own right -- cookies and deep-fried food -- and blends them into a single, savory product. Max Payne was innovative because it finally gave users a chance to experience The Matrix's bullet time effect in a real-world setting. You became the Neo of noir, guns blazing through level after level of brutally cinematic gameplay.

After the jump... the five reasons BioShock doesn't make the list.

BioShock will not stand the test of time as an example of the best the first-person-shooter genre has to offer. Because titles like that deserve to be reserved for genre-changing games like Planescape Torment, Diablo, or Half-Life. These games moved their respective genres forward; to its credit, BioShock is a fine game. But it doesn't innovate. It entertains almost as much as it makes you think, but it does nothing that hasn't already been seen ad nauseum. The fact that it combines a number of motifs into one game isn't innovative, considering first-person-shooters have been doing this since pixilated Imps tossed fireballs. Would you kindly consider the bitter truth:

Plasmids

Reviewers are talking about BioShock's "not really magic but come on, it's magic" system as if they're unfamiliar with the idea that first-person-shooter games can be more than just virtual trips through Guns & Ammo magazine. Well, it's been done. It's been done in shooters, it's the lifeblood of role-playing games; heck, you could even consider super-weapons in real-time strategy games to be a form of magic (and there's always Dungeon Keeper). Yes, you can use plasmids in a variety of interesting ways. But having a magical element make your gaming life easier through ingenuity isn't innovative. It's common sense. Heck, it was Deus Ex.

The other quasi-plasmids you receive in the game come in the form of Tonics, which you never directly use per se. You equip them and reap from their benefits, but they're as integrated into your real-time experience as magical plate mail on 48th-level warrior. Tonics are no more innovative than an inventory system, which has been a mainstay of video games since Mario and his Tanooki Suit.

Enemy Types

When I think of innovative baddies, a lot of games come to mind: the sprawling bosses of Serious Sam, the lightsaber fights in Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, the ever-creepy Alma from F.E.A.R. In contrast, BioShock has only two kinds of enemies. The default grunts are splicers -- genetically modified humans that are completely and absolutely nuts, for lack of a better phrase. They wear little masks, talk and sing in an almost lunatic fashion, and try to kill you in different ways depending on their type and the stage of the game you're at. In early BioShock, they beat you with pipes. Once you hit the late-game, they're tossing Molotov cocktails, riddling you with machine guns, and teleporting around the map.

While you also fight mechanical turrets, in the sense that they rip you to pieces if you stand in front of them, the only other true enemy of BioShock is the Big Daddy. Without going into the back-story of the character, a Big Daddy is BioShock's equivalent of Halo's Scorpion Tank. They're big, lumbering, and they hurt. They hurt real good.

And that's it. You start the game fighting splicers; you end the game fighting splicers. Aside from their presumed trip to the ammo depot somewhere around BioShock's middle, that's all the "innovation" present in BioShock. And if this is "innovative," then the palate-swapping technology of Scorpion and Sub-Zero is the Alexander Graham Bell of video games. BioShock's plenty creative in its level design and presentation. So why do you have to fight exactly the same guys for the entire trip through Rapture?

The Puzzle Game

To open locks and futz around with electronics in BioShock, you play what amounts to Pipe Dream. For those too lazy to Wikipedia this one, Pipe Dream was created in 1989. There have been countless spinoffs, adaptations, and retoolings of this classic puzzle game. But in the end, Pipe Dream is Pipe Dream. BioShock could have created its own puzzle game for the hacking sequences; Bioshock could have added different puzzle games for different devices; BioShock could have changed up the puzzle games as the difficulty progressed; BioShock could have made a random sequence of puzzle games to inject some new life into the game.

Did BioShock do any of this? No. The benefits of modifying the game's items are great, but somewhere around the middle of your Rapture adventure, you'll start doing what I did -- eschewing the puzzle games entirely, or just using a ton of autohack tools to avoid yet another game of... you guessed it. Pipe Dream. Earth to 2K games; gamers have been solving classic puzzles for years.

The Quests

No first-person shooter is devoid of lame questing elements. The worst examples of such often involve a lot of jumping and airborne maneuvering. BioShock doesn't make you leap across floating platforms of any sort. But from a gameplay perspective, the quests the game offers are standard and unremarkable. Every single major mission in the game is a FedEx quest -- you get a mission, chug across the map to get x of x components for super-special thing y, and that's it. The game will sometimes offer you a "defend this location" mission, but that always tends to occur right after the completion of said FedEx quest.

BioShock has no bonus missions or secondary quests. It gives you no incentive to do anything but follow the HUD's large, objective-pointing arrow, save for whatever personal desire you might have to explore Rapture. While you're occasionally rewarded with an errant weapons upgrade station, a substantial part of your Rapture life consists of rooting through trash bins for nothing. Or if you're lucky, materials for the U-Invent machines.

The game gives you a linear progression and repeats the same quest pattern using different materials, depending on the context of the level. How this could be at all innovative is a mystery to me.

The Activities

Aside from the archaic Pipe Dream game previously mentioned, BioShock only includes one additional activity for your trip through Rapture. At some point in the game, you're given a camera and tasked with conducting "research" on the baddies of BioShock. The game kind of sluffs off on the entire point of doing so, plot-wise, but that's neither here nor there. Every time you take pictures of Splicers, Big Daddys, or mechanical-stuff-that's-shooting-at-you and the lot, you get a form of experience (research). Take a "better" picture, and you get more. With each subsequent level of "research" you attain, you get some kind of bonus -- either in the form of more health for you, or more damage you do to that particular enemy class, or a new tonic, et cetera.

Sound familiar? Oh, right, it's a rip-off of the XBox 360's Dead Rising. BioShock isn't the first game to offer some kind of reward for putting down the pipe and picking up the photo camera, and yet, Dead Rising's system is still more feature-packed and character-applicable than BioShock's! Impressive innovation indeed -- for Dead Rising, that is.

First-look: Antec's P182SE case

David Murphy — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:30:57 -0500

[to the tune of "American Pie"]
A long, long time ago... / We can still remember / How that P182 used to make us smile.

But now what really makes us squeal / is this case covered in stainless steel / so this blog post, we are forced to compile...

Seriousness aside, Antec has set a new level in exterior achievement with its P182SE case. And I say that as I do just because, as one might expect, the 182SE is nothing more than Antec's old P182 case with some steel attached to the side. The Millennium Falcon approach to case design, if you will. But just as everyone loves that ol' hunk of bolts, I do enjoy the shiny addition to this pleasantly designed case.

The P182SE also doubles as an awesome 7-Eleven-style security mirror.

Just as a matter of business, Josh Norem reviewed Antec's P180 case in the 2005 Holiday issue. And while the 182SE obviously differs from said P180 case, I'm talking about minutia here; for all intents and purposes, the insides of the 182SE are damned near identical to the 180. With that said, Josh gave the case a 7. He thought building a system inside the case "requires extensive and aggravating cable routing through the cramped compartmentalized interior." Just wanted to get that out there, so you can have a nice, neutral path when reading the rest of this post.

Seeing as I didn't actually install a system in said case, because this isn't a straight-up review, I can't really speak to Josh's concerns over the potentially cramped interior of said chassis. The exterior, however, is decidedly beautiful. Provided you don't ever touch it with anything other than a feather duster; after getting poked and prodded by various coworkers, the 182SE on my desk is a bit smudged up with fingerprints. Antec goes to great lengths to include a little polishing rag, but it just isn't the same. When you're picking this case up from wherever you intend to buy it from, grab a few bottles of Windex as well.

And again, this isn't a review, but I definitely wanted to make a note of Antec's front-panel design. Aka: brilliance in a box. I would like all the case developers that read this blog to sit back and take a minute to admire what Antec's done. First off, the door is nicely weighted -- it's not some flimsy pieces of plastic, nor is it some irritating, heavy-as-heck, swinging gate. It's pleasant. And opening said door reveals a nice, flat front. Instead of having to open the case and remove screws, or pop off the front panel entirely, you can just pull out the drive bay covers right there. Three-second job. Also cool, the front fan covers are attached via one of those little press-in-pop-out devices, which makes accessing (and cleaning!) the fan filters an absolute... wait for it... wait for it... breeze!

If we gave awards for "easiest way to remove dust ever," the P182SE would be walking away with the gold.

The back of the case is fairly ho-hum, save for two little rubberized water cooling holes. It's great to see more cases nowadays including these little guys, and I'm glad Antec's following suit. Shown here:

I'm in your case, makin' room for your 'tubes.

And while I'm on the topic of conveniences, I enjoy the P182SE's interior design. Like I said, I can't speak to the potential constraints involved when sticking a system in the case -- here's hoping your 8800 GTX doesn't create a giant wall between the top and bottom halves of your rig. But the hard drive bays are a real gem. Grab the ring, pull 'em out, and stuff your storage on the rubberized mounting holes. And if you're worried about keeping them cool, well as you can see (and somewhat-see), there's a fan in front of the power supply for the lower bays, and you can mount a fan in front of the drives for the upper. Neat.

Antec wins +42 bonus points for the beautiful paint job on the interior of the case. We do hate the standard "gun metal gray" color of typical cases.

Unfortunately, I hope your power supply is the size of a guinea pig, because that's about all the room you'll likely have to work with in the bottom of the case. Unless you remove the cooling fan, of course. But the prospect of that saddens me greatly; fans are you friends.

Seriously. You could really fit a guinea pig in here. A free Maximum PC t-shirt to the first person who mods up a little guinea habitat in this case.

So that's that. The P182SE. Seriously, the fanciest part is the exterior, which I'm quite a fan of; I've always wanted to have a mirror at my desk, and now I have achieved that dream. Were I not flying to Chicago this weekend, I would totally build up a system in this case so I could blog about how awesome/crappy it is come Monday. Alas, though. That will have to wait. But like I said, if you enjoyed earlier versions of Antec's P-number-number-number line, you'll find striking similarities with this new version.

Can you take emo MySpace pictures on the P182SE? You bet.

HD-Arrrrrgh

<a href="/david_murphy">David Murphy</a> — Mon, 14 May 2007 21:24:47 -0500

Hokay. So. I'm but a lowly Associate Editor here at Maximum PC, which means a few things: I get the food orders, I barter with Norm The Intern for necessary provisions from the fourth floor, and I don't make any money. Or, rather, California expenses being what they are, I find myself slightly unwilling to sink a ton of cash into one of my lil' dreams -- a shiny new DSLR camera. And with it, a foothold into the exciting, over-stimulated (and overexposed, tee-hee) world of high dynamic range photography.

For the uninitiated, a high dynamic range photograph is a fairly simple concept. When you shoot a normal photograph that has a pretty extreme diversity of high and low light intensities, the camera nails one or the other -- the darkest blacks, or the brightest lights. But not both. For your camera, unlike your eyeball, can only process a certain range of color and light.

An image shot HDR-style is actually a composite of multiple images shot at different exposures. In this sense, you get the best of all worlds -- detail that was washed out becomes clear, the dark parts get darker, the light parts get lighter, et cetera. It's how photographers nail shots like these; which, to note, still look slightly more artistic and unrealistic to me than what one would see just by staring at said object, but are a helluva lot more interesting than what you might from a single-exposure shot.

Now back to my poverty. Since I can't afford a fancy camera, I rock with a Casio Exilim Z750; not a poor choice by any means, just totally worthless when it comes to shooting images at night (ISO 400 = noise central). It can handle multiple exposures, but here's the rub; I don't have a tripod, either. Thus, unless I want to duct-tape the camera to a stationary object every time I want to take a picture, HDR isn't in my future. Remember, an HDR combines multiple images -- the more movement between said images, the blurrier the final result. Yikes.

So it's with passing interest that I noticed an article on almighty Digg today -- How to fake HDR photos in Photoshop. Silly me, here I thought it would be as simple as editing a few exposure settings and blammo! Instant HDR. Well, that's not entirely the case. I won't reproduce the steps here; that would be stealing. But I will show you the results of my descent into fake-HDRdom, so you can judge for yourself whether the journey is worth it. I remain unconvinced.

Unfortunately, since I can't edit this page's header, you don't get fancy javascript rollovers. Uh. These aren't the droids you're looking for. *waves hand*

Mischa Found His Drink

(original | "hdr")

If this is HDR, count me out. The original picture looked just fine, and this... monstrosity... looks like a bunch of Photoshop filters threw up all over the place. The best part of the image is the end of the "Jekyll and Hyde" logo on the shirt; it looks crisp and effective. Other than that, though, I'm quite unimpressed. Maybe it was the shot?

Halfsies

(original | "hdr")

Thinking that perhaps it was the picture itself that was the issue with my first attempt, I decided to try the exact same set of layering techniques for a more traditional "could be HDR" image. While this looks a little bit better than the first image, it still looks a wee cartoony to me, as opposed to maintaining the delicate lush that is a nicely shot HDR image. As Gordon said, you can't really add detail to a picture that isn't there in the first place. I'm starting to believe in the truth of that statement.

At this point, I was surfing through the Digg comments to see if anyone else had as much not-luck with the technique as I did. Lo and behold, I stumbled across another technique to increase the overall highs-and-lows of your pictures -- mimicking the idea of HDR more than the actual effect -- without destroying the "normality" of your shots. Quoth, Elliuotatar:

"If you have an image where you have a really bright sky and/or a really dark foreground, do this in Photoshop

1. Duplicate image to a second layer.

2. Image->Adjustments->Desaturate second layer. (Make it black and white.)

3. Image->Adjustments->Invert second layer. (Make it a negative.)

4. Do a 64 pixel gaussian blur on the second layer. (Low pass filter. Prevents loss of high frequncy contrast on surfaces.)

5. Set the second layer to soft light.

And voila, bright portions of the image become darker, and dark portions of the image become lighter. And it looks a lot more realistic and better than those crappy HDR images most people put out."

Judge for yourself; here are some spruced-up images using his technique:

In White Light

(original | "hdr")

While the accidental overexposure of this shot already lent it a mysterious quality of sorts, the "Elliuotatar effect" adds a little detail to the foreground of the image. Hardly as dramatic as I expected, but every little bit helps, eh?

Nazis Bore Kittens

(original | "hdr")

The effect brings out a little detail around my sleeping cat's face (Colbert, if you were curious as to his name). However, I'm still not convinced that I like the added light. Maybe I'm just a fan of higher-contrast shots, but I feel like this has somewhat muted the original shot a little bit. And it's not like said shot was lacking in detail to begin with.

So what did this little photographic excursion teach me? Well, if you want an HDR shot, shoot an HDR shot to begin with. Trying to trick it out in Photoshop might work to your benefit, but by the time you're done futzing with "fake HDR," you could have just as easily re-shoot the image in the first place. That said, there's something nice about Elliuotatar's technique. When applied to certain pictures, it helps to add a bit of clarity that the shot might have otherwise lacked. Good to file away in your Photoshopper's toolbox, but not necessarily worth doing for every single picture you have.

Hitachi Deskstar T7K500

David Murphy — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:11:26 -0500

We’ll get the bad news out of the way first. Hitachi’s Deskstar T7K500 hard drive, with an easy-to-remember 500GB of storage, is unremarkable. More than that, it underperforms when compared to similarly featured, similarly priced (if not cheaper!) products.

Although the Deskstar’s speedy random access time of 13.2ms is faster than times posted by all of the similarly outfitted 500GB models we’ve looked at, that’s all this drive has going for it. The Deskstar’s average read time, which is a pretty good reflection of a drive’s performance across the entirety of the disc, taps out at an average of 64.2MB/s.

When compared against the sea of drives that sit in our Lab, the Deskstar’s average read speed is barely better than the Seagate 400GB Barracuda 7200.8’s—a PATA drive, mind you. And SATA models from both Samsung and Western Digital (which have feature sets that are nearly identical to the Deskstar’s) utterly destroy the Hitachi in our benchmarks, as both push read speeds upward of 70MB/s.

These results were slightly curious to us, as the Deskstar sports three platters of approximately 166GB apiece. That gives it quite a boost in areal density when compared to the Western Digital Caviar’s measly four-platter 125GB setup. As we’ve seen in the past, drives with juicer areal densities tend to run faster. But not in the Deskstar’s case!

So, what then is the good news? If Hitachi’s new terabyte drive helps lower the price of the company’s smaller models, the cost-to-benefit ratio of the T7K500 could, in the future, make it a nice solution. That’s about the only silver lining we see.