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Things I saw at the Gadget show live - Gaming Exhibition area |
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Nintendo had a great display of all of their handheld console throughout the ages, right up to the 3DS, which takes a little getting used to.
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Things I saw at the Gadget show live - Cat Genie self flushing cat box |
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The Gadget Show live Birmingham exhibition happened a few weeks ago, and amongst the exhibition stands there I spotted a rather intriguing cat gadget.
I've got a family of cats so I'm always interest in cat related gadgetry but I think perhaps an automated litter box might be a bit too much.
That's right, the image above is from this site, http://www.catgenie.co.uk/ where you can watch a video of the self flushing cat litter toilet. This thing is huge, and about as loud as our Dyson vacuum cleaner. I'm dubious as to whether any of my cats would even get near it let alone in it.
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OCZ Vertex 2 SE SSD (Solid State Drive) review |
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Over the Easter weekend though I bit the bullet and ordered an OCZ Vertex 2SE 120gig Solid State Drive. This drive (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/120gb-ocz-technology-vertex-2e-25-sandforce-ssd-mlc-flash-read-285mb-s-write-275mb-s ) has reputed read speeds of 285 MB/s and write speeds of 275 MB/s.
Installation
Installation of the drive is very simple. It has standard SATA connections for data and power. The only thing to watch out for is that most of these drives are 2.5" form factor, so they may only fit in specific places in your desktop.The drive was detected in the BIOS immediately, the only setting of note here is that you are running the SATA ports in AHCI mode as this is rumoured to effect the performance of the drive. You can retrospectively enable this mode of operation for the drive after you have installed an OS, but it's a little trickier doing it this way. This article is helpful in getting AHCI working after you have already installed your OS. http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831
Benchmarking
Most hard drive reviews use several different industry standard software suites to benchmark drives, so I used the ATTO benchmark software (http://www.attotech.com/products/product.php?sku=Disk_Benchmark) to run read and write test on OCZ Vertex 2 SE.
The images above show that the OCZ SSD reached speeds of just over 200 MB/s write and 250 MB/s read speeds. Not quite the advertised speeds, but I am running an old SATA chipset (nForce 4) and I am unable to use AHCI mode as the motherboard does not support it. So your chipset does matter to some degree.
None the less this shows very high read/write performance that isn't far off the advertised limits.
As a comparison I ran HD Tune against my existing 7200 SATA Hitachi drive, which produced the results below.
Real world
In terms of real world performance I ran a few timed events against the drive, starting with a Windows 7 install. Starting from the License entry screen it only took sixteen minutes to get to a working desktop. Similarly installing Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was an eight minute install. Even more impressive was Microsoft Office 2007, where a full install took just over four minutes.Windows 7 recognises and will accommodate SSD drives very well, but there are several good resources for checking that an SSD drive is running as it should, and that you are treating it properly. The link below are interesting reading when it comes to dealing with using SSD drives with ReadyBoost and disk Defragmenter as they can adversely effect its performance.
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Streaming media to Xbox 360's and PS3's using Twonky Media Suite |
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I run a windows server 2003 pc at home, server 2003 is a great little web server that can handle multiple roles, including file storage. Unfortunately it is not Upnp (universal Plug and Play) so will not stream media directly to media players like Xbox 360 consoles, and the Playstation 3.
The traditional (and recommended) solution to this is to stream the media through another more modern operating system that has upnp / dnla connections that reside in Windows Media player. This can restrict where you store files on a network, I for one do not want to store media on a desktop machine that I rebuild every 4-6 months.
Another solution to this is to use a software application that acts as a translation layer. There are a few around, but the one I've been testing out recently is the Twonky Media Suite. It installs as a software service, and sits quietly in the background and serves up any media requests that hit it. It also appears on the network as a Upnp device, so it will be found by media players, and consoles.
http://twonkymedia.com/products/twonkymanager/default.aspx
Simply install the trial version, in the setup manager point to your media directories, and then fire up your media player. It will find it and allow you to browse through the different media types, completely bypassing the need for windows media center connections, or operating systems that are a little too old to know about Upnp or dnla.
