Displaying items by tag: small form factor

The world of storage is evolving very quickly as the way PCs are built change. We have watched as the traditional single dive systems have given way to hybrid drives, multiple disk systems and even systems with additional cache in them. All of these measures are designed to give you more options for your system, but there is (at times) a limit to what can be done. This is typically the size of the drive. For years the typical disk was 3.5 inches and about ½ of what the common bay height was. With the original SSDs this dropped significantly and has been followed on by mSATA, mini-mSATA and now M.2. These offer high density storage in a very small package. Today we are checking out ADATA’s SP900NS38 256GB M.2 SATA SSD. Let’s see what kind of performance it offers shall we?

The team behind the popular miniature platform Raspberry Pi boasted on its Website with a new product. It is a new version of the Raspberry Pi , which aims to make the whole system more transparent and easier, it is called the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. It is essentially a motherboard with a dimensions 67,6x30 millimeters at which they managed to compress the basic hardware to which users are accustomed with the old Raspberry, but without ports for peripherals.

Zotac is preparing new models of ZBOX mini PCs for this summer. To ensure a quieter operation, this time they will equip their machines with passive cooling.

Patriot Viper 3 Low Profile memory comes in three different capacities. The smallest kit of 8GB, medium one with 16GB and the largest one with 32GB. Low Profile of the name refers to the height of memory which is 1.25 inches (3.17 cm). Memory supports speeds of 1600 MHz, 1866 MHz and 2133 MHz and is XMP 1.3 certified.

The trend of manufacturing thinner disks with larger capacity is continued by Western Digital with their launch of WD10SPCX. Disk enters the company's Blue product line and comes in 2.5-inch format suitable for notebooks.

If you wonder who are those hardworking workers that produce probably the most popular hobby computer today - fantastic Raspberry Pi, the answer may surprise you. They are Sony's employees in their factory in Wales. Although behind Raspberry production are two companies, Premier Farnell and RS Components, the former has no own facilities but they rentead a Sony factory in Pencoed, Wales last November, which has so far made over half a million of these devices.

A Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer that has a chance to revolutionize the world by extending the opportunity of owning a computer to the masses. The producers of this device, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, are a charitable organization based out of the United Kingdom. Their goal is relatively simple: to provide an inexpensive and easily accessible means for children and teenagers to learn to program . I will primarily be focusing on the Model B, the more capable of the two types currently available.

Not that long ago DFI sent me an interesting little board. This was their Mini-ITX  P55 LanParty board. Unfortunately, it died during testing (a choke blew up, literally blew up) but it was only the first of many that would begin to parade into the market.  Now sitting next to me is another Mini-ITX board, this one from GIGABYTE (and hopefully better made). It is their H55 version so it is really meant to run the Clarkdale series CPUs although it can certainly run any of the 1156 CPUs from Intel.