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We have only included sata hard drives this time sidelining ide completely. Ide will live on for at least a couple of years more but we want to present you the ground reality. Sata is in and ide is on its way to a speedy exit. One of the things helping the sata cause is the fact that even entry level motherboards ship with sata controllers today . granted ide drives are still being sole but the fact remains that there are very few of them and future development prospects are too dim to warrant a shootout.

Of the 21 sata drives we pitted against each other two were from Hitachi two from Maxtor four from samsung .three form Seagate and there was a large contingent of 10 from western digital. All the brands were thus represented adequately to give you as wide a perspective as we possibly can about the drives available in the market today.

FEATURES CAPACITY

The Hitachi deskstar 7k1000 with a huge 1 tb capacity was the largest internal sata drive we have ever laid our hands on. This drive featuring perpendicular recording technology featured a platter density of 250 mb the highest we have seen so far shattering the previous record of 188 set by the Seagate barracuda 7200.9 st3750640as.

When it comes to sharing your data or simply synchronizing data between your office and hom . external hard drives ply a vital role. The best thing is that you do not need to open your cabinet to transfer data just plug it into the usb port an play!

We selected 13 drives for this test. Of these two were from lomega five from wd three from maxtor one from Philips and two were from seagate.

BACKUP EXERNAL HARD DRIVES

These drives are meant for large and frequent backups . capacities start from 250gb. And the process are considerable y higher too. Most of them come with backup software of some kind and special features such as back up buttons. Fire wire ports are common too. These drives are bulkier than those in the portable drive category as they seldom need to be carried around. System administrators rather than home users are the consumers for this category of external hard drives.

There was a 250 gb lomega a 500 gb and a 1 tb drive from Maxtor three 500 gb and one 1 tb drive from wd a 250 gb drive form Philips and a 750 gb drive from seagate in this category.

Sata is the de facto standard to hard disk storage today the older ide or pata is passé. So what’s different . does it deliver what it promises . s it really worth it or is it hype?

To start with sata drives support a faster data throughput than ide drives while ide drives cap at 133 mbps sata drives begin at 1.5 gbps while sata 11 can go up to eell 3 gbpps. When benchmarked against ide drives it does show an appreciable improvement in the throughputs these numbers are therefore not just on paper you can see the performance improvement in real life scenarios such as file copying and application lading .

Sata dries feature a four conductor data cable that does not t just make it slimmer remain tangle free and enable better ventilation in the cabinet but also a lo easier to attach. Hot plug is yet another advantage offered by sata drives. This feature lets you plug or remove a a sata drive without switching off the pc. The sata controller on the motherboard must support this feature though. Another important feature of sata drives is native command queuing which it borrwos from scsi drives. Ncq improves efficency and performance . during normal reads or writes commands arrive at the disk and are executed on a fist come first served basis. This creates a mechanical overhead when the read write head had o be constantly repositioned . sata drives make use of an algorithm to determine the efficient way to execute this queue of commands to create the least possible mechanical overhead. This results in a general performance increase. This feature was initially only forum on sata 11 drives but has since been incorporated in many sata1 drives too.

History proves our species is one of incurable hoarders form precious mental to food from fuel to weapons . there is something else mankind has hoarded through the ages information. The digital era has pandered to this whim even encouraged it.

Steady advancements in drive technology have seen sharply declining prices is another significant factor . a 250 gb desktop hard drive retiles at around rs 3500 today. While a 160 gb five drive costing in excess of rs 4500 a couple of years ago Is available for as little as rs 2700 now. Price per gb is own to rupees 16.875 pet gb or .01 paisa pet mb. Larger drives have also become cheaper a 400gb drive costs under 5000 rupees now.

Serial ata has matured as an interface quickly becoming de facto for desktop hard drives. Perpendicular recording technology has emerged leading to even greater capacities due to increased areal density. The 7550 gb barrier was hit last year and this year hitachi has hit 1 terabyte the I tera byte Hitachi features a 32 megabyte cache and five platters each capable of 200 gb . though the initial cost of cramming so much data pet platter is high , acceptance in the market will cause economies of large scale production to take over.

IBM is right back into spotlight. Ibm research lab scientists have been inspired by the self assembling proes pattern found in the formation of tooth enamel seashells and snowflakes. Applaying the principle behind these scientists there have built a next generation computer chi p using a special polymer.

IBM might not be in the microchip war but is has a legacy of its won . the y have always been show stoppers with their breakthrough . ibm has made at least 10 significant breakthroughs in the past few years . recall the cell processor integrating ibm’s power architecture. The industry wide problem of transistor leakage in chips was solved by ibm in January 2007 . a special material with superior electrical qualities was used in the primary on/off switching portion of the transistors which made them more power efficient. Ibm worked with amd . sony and thshiba in partnership for this development.

In february they replaced sram with the speedy edram on the 65nm microchip to be able to increase the on processor memory using about 33 % lesser space on the chip . in April ibm with their 3d chip stacking technique showed that stacking semiconductor components vertically instead of horizontally gave performance boosts and energy efficiency.

The memory market have seen its share of trials and tribulations the past couple of years. Now ddr2 is as common as cows on a highway wile ddr memory’s availability is somewhat sporadic. 667 mhz memory as the new entry level solution for desktops. Pc 6400 memory ddr2 from brands like corsair . Kingston and transcend are readily available. A 1 gb stick of ddr2 667 mh memory can now be had for as little as rs 2000., 512 mb or ddr memory costs the same incidentally.

The enthusiast memory market is till in its infancy in india with low latency memory costing upwards of rs 15000. don’t expect any miracles in this segment because demand for such memory is extremely low.

Intel promises ddr3 memory as a replacement for ddr2 over the next three years . the benefits of this would be lower power consumption and much highest bandwidth.

The reason for the change over is the speed barriers that ddr2 has hit mainly due to thermal issues and of course material limits.intel visualizes processor performance scaling higher and they feel memory would bottleneck their quad core offerings. Based on global sales intel is in a strong enough position to dictate terms to memory manufacturers . other giants including Microsoft are also in favour of this move. We already know vista is m memory bandwidth hog.

How long are we going o be tied to the keyboard and mouse. How long will we have to type sms and make phone calls using our already sore thumbs?

Over the years we have hears of and seen la lot of technologies that promise to radically change the way we interact with technology gadgets and gizmos. The keyboard and mouse was revolutionary then came the stylus and tablet pcs speech recognition promised but still needs some work eye control and brain control is being researches with prototypes already out the future seems promising or is it just teasing us ?

In recent times two products have caught the world’s fancy the iphone and the wii. The iphone is remarkable for a lot of reasons including the fact that it runs os z on a phone but it captures the limelight mainly because of its interface. It’s not new technology not by a long shot all apple’s done is use its patented multi touch technology on a screen some thing that macbook users have already become used to when using the touch pad on their laptops. A touch pad that recognises the touch of two or more fingers isn’t wild enough t o have technology enthusiasts raving but the fact that it’s on a phone is good because it changes things radically. No more pressing buttons just tap screens . pinch to zoom in reverse the action to zoom out . the ipod is already famous for its much acclaimed interface as I mac os X

Processors the very word brings to mind numerical crunching monsters that eat a few thousand floating points for breakfast. This is one dominion of computing that enjoys big increments in performance every year of so Ever shrinking fabrication processes bring the all significant advantages of reducing costs and power saving .

The two giants intel and amd are locked in a struggle for top market dog. we’ve witnessed the fallout courtesy amd’s athlon64 a few years ago. More recently intel’s core 2 duo fuelled retaliation it came as a shock even to industry experts. the Gigahertz battle is a thing of the past and parallelism is the new order of things.

Intels’s core 2 duo desktop and notebook range will soon be replaced by a derivative of the same architecture code named penryn.

Penryn gets a die shrink from 65nm to 45nm. Code named wolfdale the duall core penryn features 6mb of l2 cace . the quad core penryn code named yorkfield ads 4mb over the core 2wuad’s 8mb l2 cache.

Besides minor architectural changes like reduction in processor instruction latency improver ipc and tweaks to the cache and memory management subsystems penryn’s improved thermal efficiency allows it to enjoy higher colcks thatn core 2. improvements have also been made in power management but this is restricted to the notebook space where thermal envelops are more restrictive.

Intel’s benchmarks indicate nearly 25% performance increments over core 2 . while such a large boost is exciting there’s even more…Nehalem a radical new architecture as intel pitches it takes the term multithreading to a whole new level. With native support for eight cores on a single die Nehalem has the industry salivating . although details of power management are sketchy intel’s quotes dynamic management which could mean independent power management for each core.

The only category of computing hardware more exciting than processors at the moment or for that matter in and even greater state of flux is the gpu. And it’s infinitely more noticeable too. Seeing is equal to believing and gpu are all about the visual experience.

Graphics cards have lost the stigma of being a gamer’s tool. we’ve seen greater acceptance of these processing marvels in many a home . the reason is the burgeoning drive for all thing multimedia moves digital imaging and yea games and it’s the entertainment industry by large that drives gpu manufactures back to their drawing boards to come out with solution capable of drive their products .and the entertainment industry isn’st self drive either it’s driven by us /it’s in our nature t o notice and applaud beauty. A simple example anyone who has used widows xp for a few days will find moving back to windows 98 painful inconvenient and messy not to mention and eyesore take a wild guess as to what would happen if this new windows xp fan were to be exposed to windows vista for a few days?

As with cpu the words of add on desktop notebook graphics solutions is a two brand show NVIDIA and ATI the phenomenon of one up is seen at work her . NVIDIA had some successive with their move to a 90nm fabrication process with their g71 and G73 parts which were adopted by gamers and multimedia aficionados alike . We’ve seen what ATI is capable of courtesy the 48pixel units on their c1900xtx series. These cards were directx9 ready and played most current generation games with a blatant absence of stuttering frames.

Then the whole directx 10 boom happened and both manufacturers were back at their drawing boards trying to outwit each other at designing a solution for an api that hasn’t seen the light of day yet. Their API would obviously need a lot more processing power and current dx 9 games were pushing the latest cards anyway.

Out came unified shaders and NVIDIA beat ATI to the launch with 128 such shaders on board their sistor behemoth features . for the first time a 384 bit memory interface which in itself provides a huge theoretical advantage over the previously d e facto 256 bits. Lower variants of the gtx designated gts followed.

While talking about the fastest processors high bandwidth low latency memory and the newest batch of direct z10 cards we often forget the component that brings all these products together under a single roof . the motherboard is very little more than the sum of its chipsets with a hunk of silicon thrown in to hold everything. It ‘s this motherboard that dictates compatibility by allowing or restricting use of certain processors memory and other components. It may seem therefore that the motherboard dictates the choice of the other components. Wrong !

Motherboard chipsets have been evolving leading to improved products supporting newer processors primarily a well as other allied technologies. However made no mistake it’s been the processor industry that has largely dictated terms t chipset vendors even memory vendors for that matter.

YOUR HAVE TO ASK YOURSELF ARE THESE NEW CHIPSETS MERELY PLATFORMS TO HOUSE FASTER PROCESSORS?

This was due to thermal issues in particular. This brought about a major change in chipsets intel’s very own 875.865 gave way to their 935.965 chipsets emerge from 955.945 chipset based beards because of their incompatibility with the core 2 duo.

AMD has seen its share of changes and upheavals too . The move to DDR2 initiated by intels to complement its then latest Pentium d processors forced and to shift to a new platform as well am2 which brought ddr2 compatibility to and systems.

With their latest generation of processors amd and intels will be leaping to yet another platform . intel has lots of 45nm plans based around penryn their core 2 duo successor . This involves a new chipset code named bear lade aka th p35 . that will support these processors. This is the mid range offering replacing the p965 .There’s support for ddr2 and ddr3 memory 1333mhz fsb support a spanking new southbridge and more