When looking to build a mATX PC there are more and more case options coming on the market.  BitFenix has a lot of choices for mATX and Mini-ITX cases and the Prodigy M is the big brother to the Prodigy case that is for Mini-ITX.  The BitFenix Prodigy M is one of the more popular mATX cases on the market now and  after testing we found out why that is.  The case is a bit unique with the power supply being relocated to the front of the case while using an extension to allow the power cord to plug into the rear of the case.  This design allows for more open space around the motherboard and components when everything is installed.  The downside we found was that depending on the size of the power supply used there can be interference with installed GPUs or longer add-in cards.

Specifications

Model: BFC-PRM-300-KKXSK-RP

Type: MicroATX Mini Tower

Color: Midnight BlackCase

Material: Steel / PlasticWith

Power Supply: No

Power Supply Mounted: Bottom

Motherboard Compatibility: Micro ATX, Mini-ITX

Cooling: 2x 120mm Fans

Front Ports: USB 3.0 / Audio

Dimensions: 250 x 404 x 359mm

Expansion

External 5.25″ Driver Bays:1

Internal 3.5″ Drive Bays: 4

Internal 2.5″ Drive Bays: 5

Expansion Slots: 5

Features

Cooling Top: 120mm x 2 (optional)

Cooling Bottom: 120mm x 2 (1 included) or 200mm x 1(optional) or 230mm x 1 (optional)

Cooling Rear: 120mm x 1 (included) or 140mm x 1 (optional)

FyberFlex handles, SofTouch surface treatment, heat shield

The next page will cover Packaging and Case Design

The post BitFenix Prodigy M: High Quality In A Small Size appeared first on VR World.

Samsung Electronics America said on Nov. 27 that the company has established a new gaming bundle offer with Ubisoft.

The deal will provide purchasers of a Samsung 840 EVO solid state drive (SSD) with a bonus download of Far Cry 4, which is the latest action-adventure game in the popular Far Cry Series.

“The 840 EVO SSD offers users with blazing fast speeds, unmatched reliability and overall sustained performance, making it the ideal choice for gamers,” said Ron Gazzola, vice president of marketing of Samsung Electronics America. “Players can renew their Far Cry gaming experience with more visually rich effects and noticeably faster loading times. We are thrilled to offer this gaming bundle deal to our customers.”

Gazzola said that players of the action-packed Far Cry 4 will be able to enjoy superior gaming through Samsung’s best-in-class driver performance with the 840 EVO. The drive is significantly faster than a standard hard disk drive (HDD), with decreased loading times, enhanced responsiveness and improved gameplay. He said that the driver’s low idle power consumption and exceptional multi-tasking capabilities will help eliminate choppy or lagging performances.

Samsung said that the Far Cry 4 download is available for Samsung 840 EVO SSD’s 250GB, 500GB, 750GV and 1TB. Downloads can be redeemed on Samsung.com/fc4 until Sept. 1, 2015.

The post Samsung Distributes Far Cry 4 With 840 EVO SSDs appeared first on VR World.

HGST has been known to break capacity barriers in the data storage industry. Now, the company is yet again setting a new milestone, with its introduction of the world’s very first enterprise-class 10TB 3.5-inch HDD.

Last year HGST made headlines when it finally launched its very first HelioSeal HDDs. HelioSeal technology is the company’s method of sealing HDDs in helium to improve performance. The 6TB helium-filled drives were the first HDDs to showcase a significant boost in storage capacity, about 40% more compared to the competition at the time.

The new 10TB HDD, based from its designation, will again feature HelioSeal tech. As with most of the latest heavy-capacity enterprise HDDs to hit the tech market this year, the new HDD also uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. HGST claims that the efficient combination of both HelioSeal and SMR technologies provide the new HDD unprecedented storage capacity, at a performance level and distribution cost that is feasible for mass production.

The official name for the new hard drive is yet to be revealed, however HGST did announce that it will be targeted towards cold storage, WORM type and active archive type data storage systems. The further lowered power consumption and improved storage capacity of the new HDD is advertised to be especially useful for data applications that require “efficient, accessible, long term retention.”

On the other side of the announcement, HGST have also started production and shipping of its latest Ultrastar 7K6000 HDD. The HDD will be available in 6TB capacity, and is the very last generation model of the company’s air-filled standard hard drives. Spec-wise, this 3.5-inch HDD is at least 30% more power efficient than the previous Ultrastar 7K4000, and jam packs 1.2 TB of storage space in each of its five disks.

Samples for the new HDDs are already available, though there are no announcements about its eventual mass production just yet.

This post originally appeared on VR World, the Asia-Pacific sister site of Bright Side of News*

The post HGST Unveils The World's First 10TB 3.5-inch HDD appeared first on VR World.

HGST has been known to break capacity barriers in the data storage industry. Now, the company is yet again setting a new milestone, with its introduction of the world’s very first enterprise-class 10TB 3.5-inch HDD.

Last year HGST made headlines when it finally launched its very first HelioSeal HDDs. HelioSeal technology is the company’s method of sealing HDDs in helium to improve performance. The 6TB helium-filled drives were the first HDDs to showcase a significant boost in storage capacity, about 40% more compared to the competition at the time.

The new 10TB HDD, based from its designation, will again feature HelioSeal tech. As with most of the latest heavy-capacity enterprise HDDs to hit the tech market this year, the new HDD also uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. HGST claims that the efficient combination of both HelioSeal and SMR technologies provide the new HDD unprecedented storage capacity, at a performance level and distribution cost that is feasible for mass production.

The official name for the new hard drive is yet to be revealed, however HGST did announce that it will be targeted towards cold storage, WORM type and active archive type data storage systems. The further lowered power consumption and improved storage capacity of the new HDD is advertised to be especially useful for data applications that require “efficient, accessible, long term retention.”

On the other side of the announcement, HGST have also started production and shipping of its latest Ultrastar 7K6000 HDD. The HDD will be available in 6TB capacity, and is the very last generation model of the company’s air-filled standard hard drives. Spec-wise, this 3.5-inch HDD is at least 30% more power efficient than the previous Ultrastar 7K4000, and jam packs 1.2 TB of storage space in each of its five disks.

Samples for the new HDDs are already available, though there are no announcements about its eventual mass production just yet.

The post HGST unveils the world’s first 10TB 3.5-inch HDD appeared first on VR World.

Today I’m taking another look at Western Digital’s WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ enterprise drives. I reviewed a single WD4000FYYZ in our Western Digital 4 TB roundup, and Western Digital was kind enough to provide us with some more drives to put through their paces.

The WD RE 4 TB FYYZ was the highest performing drive in our earlier roundup, and as an enterprise drive, it’s rated for double the load/unload cycles of the consumer drives. As such, these drives are optimized for RAID arrays.

The specifications of the drive are below:

• Interface – SATA 6.0Gb/s
• Capacity – 4TB
• RPM – 7200 RPM
• Cache – 64MB
• Load/Unload Cycles – 600,000

I’ll start off with the basic configuration, a single FYYZ drive.

In AIDA64, the single drive has a top linear read of 171.0 MB/s, a random read of 148.8 MB/s, and a buffered read of 345.2 MB/s. It has an average read access of 12.19 ms.

In CrystalDiskMark, the single drive provided a sequential read of 176.6 MB/s and a sequential write of 171.8 MB/s.

We had an issue with AIDA64 and the average read access times. For some reason they were coming out as 0.00 ms for the RAID 0 and 1 arrays, which is incorrect. The AIDA64 screenshots below still include the average read access, but any 0.00 ms times should be ignored

Moving on to two of the 4 TB FYYZ drives in RAID 1, a mirrored array, however, an NTFS RAID 1 array won’t provide any speed benefits.

In AIDA64, the two drive RAID 1 array has a top linear read of 173.6 MB/s, a random read of 130.7 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7278.0 MB/s.

In CrystalDiskMark, the two drive WD RE 4 TB RAID 1 array provided a sequential read of 176.5 MB/s and a sequential write of 166.8 MB/s.

Next up are the two WD RE 4 TB drives in RAID 0, a striped array, meaning performance should almost double.

In AIDA64, the two drive RAID 0 array has a top linear read of 339.3 MB/s, a random read of 289.1 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7359.2 MB/s.

In CrystalDiskMark, the two drive RAID 0 array provided a sequential read of 338.3 MB/s and a sequential write of 334.1 MB/s.

Now we get to the behemoth four 4 TB FYYZ drives in RAID 0, for an array 16 TB in size. The performance should be impressive.

In AIDA64, the four drive RAID 0 array has a top linear read of 713.5 MB/s, a random read of 559.7 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7440.5 MB/s.

In CrystalDiskMark, the four drive RAID 0 array provided a sequential read of 657.1 MB/s and a sequential write of 642.6 MB/s.

These figures are better than any consumer-grade SSD currently on the market, and certainly this array provides a much larger capacity.

We also tested four WD RE 4 TB drives in RAID 10. RAID 10 is the same as RAID 1 + 0, meaning that two pairs of drives are striped, and those pairs are mirrored. This array should yield similar performance to the two drive RAID 0 array, however, note the disclaimer below.

Disclaimer: It should be noted that the RAID 10 benchmarks were done via SATA 2.0 (3 Gbps) on an Intel X79 chipset, whereas the rest of the benchmarks in this review were done via SATA 3.0 (6 Gbps) on an AMD 990FX chipset. This will likely have some effect on the performance of the drives.

In AIDA64, the four drive RAID 10 array has a top linear read of 327.9 MB/s, a random read of 265.4 MB/s, and a buffered read of 6902.5 MB/s. It has an average read access of 11.92 ms.

In CrystalDiskMark, the four drive RAID 10 array provided a sequential read of 336.0 MB/s and a sequential write of 322.5 MB/s.

The drives themselves are very impressive, and scale well in RAID configurations. The WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ currently retails for $300. While this might be a bit too pricey for the average consumer, prosumers and businesses interested in drive performance and guaranteed durability should definitely consider the WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ.

The post Review: Western Digital Enterprise WD RE 4 TB Drive appeared first on VR World.

There is no denying that SSD capacities have been steadily increasing with each generation of NAND improvements and with newer and newer controllers. But the holy grail has always been how much capacity can you fit into a 2.5″ drive since that is the most commonly used form factor for more enterprise drives nowadays. As such, it was astonishing to hear that SanDisk was able to cram 4TB of solid state storage into a single 2.5″ drive, which supposedly isn’t the end of SanDisk’s innovation. The SanDisk Optimus MAX SAS SSDs are specifically designed to replace spinning 10k and 15k RPM 2.5″ HDDs and to do it without compromising on performance or capacity, in fact, with the new 4TB drive (if you can afford it) you can actually get far more capacity than with a traditionally 600GB 15K RPM drive. If you go down towards a 10k RPM drive, you can probably get a drive up to 1.2 TB, but even then you’re nowhere near 4TB or anywhere near the IOPS that the SSDs are capable of delivering.

The drive’s performance numbers are using SAS 6Gb/s (they have a different series of drives that are SAS 12Gb/s) sporting a Sequential Read/Write (MB/s) of up to 400/400 MB/s and random read/write IOPS of 75K/15K. This is all backed by SanDisk’s 5 year warranty which covers the drive for at least 5 years or until the drive is ‘worn’ down completely (which ever comes first). The reason why this drive is capable of such speeds and such capacities in such a form factor is because SanDisk is using their new 19nm eMLC NAND which is going to give the drive unbeatable capacity. Even more importantly with the 19nm eMLC, this drive will be capable of unparalleled writes compared to most other MLC-based enterprise drives, which will give it fairly good performance but unparalleled longevity and stability, which is ultimately the most important thing when replacing 10k and 15k RPM spinning disks.

There are talks of SanDisk introducing 8TB and 16TB models of the Optimus MAX drives down the road, but as of right now, the 4TB drive is the biggest that SanDisk is offering, but enables petabytes of SSD storage per rack rather than per row. In fact, if you went with a Supermicro SC417E series server, which is only 4U. You could cram a massive 288 TB of SSD storage per server, meaning that you could get 1 Petabyte of SSD storage in essentially half a rack, or around 2 Petabytes per rack. Keep in mind, that this isn’t even possible with spinning disks as the 2.5″ drives are only capable of capacities of up to 2TB per disk and even those are rare. There’s no denying that these 4TB drives are going to cost a pretty penny, but they consume very little power, generate very little heat and cause zero vibration which means they don’t negatively affect each other’s longevity like a lot of other spinning disks do when they’re installed in high density clusters.

I’m excited to see what Seagate’s competitors can come up with, namely Toshiba and Samsung, but as of right now they are the high capacity kings and they’re probably going to win some serious business because of it.

The post SanDisk Launches World's First 2.5" 4TB SSD appeared first on VR World.

Today I’m taking a look at the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB portable hard drive. However, referring to it as a hard drive is a bit misleading, as the Backup Plus FAST is actually two 2 TB 2.5” drives in a RAID 0 array. This contributes to the speeds the drives can provide, as a striped RAID 0 array improves performance to up to double of what a single drive would be capable of.

The drive comes in basic packaging, which includes a quick-start guide, an 18” USB 3.0 cable, and a USB 3.0 Y cable, which has two USB connectors: one for power and one for data. The reason it comes with two separate cables is that some USB 3.0 ports alone will not have enough power for the drive, so in those cases, the Y cable should be used.

The drive itself is 4.6×2.35” (116.9×82.5mm). It comes in a single color, black, and has a sleek metal exterior. I took some pictures with it next to and on top of my Nexus 5 to provide some reference.

The Backup Plus FAST 4 TB comes with the Seagate Dashboard software preloaded for easy registration of the product and installation of the software.

The Seagate Dashboard has been recently redone, and Seagate has certainly made some improvements to the UI and functionality of the software.

In addition to backing up computers over the network, the software also allows for backing up social media accounts as well as mobile devices. A really cool feature for the mobile backup is the ability to back up to the hard drive over WiFi, or to set up the phone to back up to a cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, allowing the mobile device to be constantly backed up on those services. This is a huge feature since phones are often lost, stolen, or broken. It provides a really easy and simple way to keep the contents of your phone backed up. I especially like the fact that Seagate doesn’t require you to sign up for their own cloud service for backup, but allows you to utilize Dropbox or Google Drive instead, as they’re much more commonly used cloud services.

Seagate Dashboard supports Windows and Mac, and the mobile app (necessary for mobile backup) is available for Android and iOS. Getting to the performance side of things, the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB is accurately labeled “FAST”. It should be noted that all our benchmarks were done using USB 3.0 to maximize the capabilities of the drive.

CrystalDiskMark showed sequential reads of 245 MB/s, and sequential writes of 250 MB/s, most hard drives provide half those speeds, even when connected via SATA rather than USB. Clearly the RAID 0 array is speeding things up nicely.

AIDA64 showed a Maximum Linear Read at 238 MB/s, a Random Read of 179 MB/s, a Buffered Read of 310 MB/s, and an Average Read Access of 0.00 ms. To put that in perspective, a single new SSD usually gets an Average Read Access of 0.09 ms. The RAIDed Backup Plus FAST truly provides some awesome performance, especially for a portable external hard drive.

Now to the bad news: the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB has an MSRP of $270, and currently retails for the same price. Compared to Seagate’s other offerings, such as a 2 TB Backup Plus that is lighter, thinner, and currently retails for around $120, two of which could be had for $240, you may want to consider if the $30 premium for a single, thicker drive is worth is. A Seagate desktop (non-portable) 4 TB drive currently retails for $170, creating a $100 differential with the portable drive. However, it’s important to remember that the Backup Plus FAST provides things these other offerings do not. The Backup Plus FAST is much smaller and lighter, and obviously more portable than the desktop external drive, as well as significantly faster. Also, compared to the other portable drives, the performance of the FAST far exceeds them, and a $30 premium to have a single device rather than two separate ones, and one that is much faster than the other two would be seems like a small price to pay.

One has to consider if they need that level of performance or that capacity in their drive, and also if they want their external drive to be portable or not. If those are all requirements, the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB is hard to beat. Western Digital recently released its My Passport Pro 4 TB that also utilizes a RAID 0 array for similar performance, but uses a Thunderbolt connector rather than USB 3.0. Also, the Western Digital has an MSRP of $430, a far cry from $270. For those looking on the high end, we highly recommend the Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB.

The post Review: Seagate Backup Plus FAST 4 TB Portable Hard Drive appeared first on VR World.

Seagate is finally catching up to their competition with the announcement of their 6TB drive that finally brings the company into the realm of drives over 5TB. Their competition, WDC launched the HGST 6TB enterprise drive with Helium all the way back in November. While I’m not sure what took Seagate so long, it may not bode well for the company that they’re so far behind in terms of capacity. There are a lot of reasons that we could suspect why it took Seagate so long, but nevertheless they are here.

Yes, this drive is a 3.5″ drive, which comes as no surprise to anyone that knows about drive capacities. All of the leading capacity drives start out as 3.5″ drives and eventually their technology enables higher 2.5″ drive capacities. This drive will come in SATA 6G and SAS 12G, each with four different flavors and four different capacities. There will be two standard models one with 4KN (advanced 4K formatting) and one with 512E and an SED model as well as an SED-FIPS model. There will also be 5TB, 4TB and 2TB capacities of this same updated enterprise model and all version of this drive will be shipping with 128 MB of cache.

All of these drives will be 7200 RPM and are rated at a 1.4M MTBF, which makes these drive relatively reliable even though Seagate’s reliability has been put into question as of late by multiple publications and even by some of our own experiences with their 2.5″ enterprise drives.

In terms of performance, the SATA6G (SATA 3.0) drives are expected to deliver a sustained sequential read speed of up to 216 MB/s while the SAS12G (SAS 12 Gbps) interface drives are expected to deliver an extra 10 MB/s at 226 MB/s of sustained sequential read speeds. Seagate claims that this is the fastest 6TB drive in the world and as a result that would explain why they didn’t necessarily launch as early as WDC did with their HGST drive. The drives latencies remain the same across the board with an average latency of 4.16 ms. Their power consumption is also expected to hover around 8w (SAS) and 7w (SATA) under average idle power and almost 12w (SAS) and 11w (SATA) under typical operating conditions with random reads.

The final retail price still hasn’t been released yet, but I would expect it to sell in excess of $400 per drive, probably closer to $500.

The post Seagate Launches 6TB Enterprise Drive, Following Western Digital's Last Year appeared first on VR World.

Couple of years ago, I believed in WD’s Marketing moto “Put Your Life On It!” and purchased WD’s external hard drive box, containing “A grade” hard drive. That drive contained all of my pictures in period between 2002-2005 and needless to say, it wasn’t going anywhere but stayed on my desk. One day, this drive simply stopped working. I took it to a data recovery company and was told that the drive has manufacturers fault and that the head scratched the drive to that level that the data could not be recovered. Needless to say, I started to back up things on DVDs and even on Blu-ray media.

Today’s announcement of Western Digital’s 2TB Green drive brings sheer joy at the amount of data you can put in a five drive RAID5 array. Bear in mind that almost every motherboard sold in the past couple of years can fit at least four of these monsters, so you can have 8TB of data on your personal computer.

Then again, backing up 8TB of data is nothing short of logistical nightmare, since Blu-ray offers only 25 or 50GB of data and will charge you an arm and a leg for a single writable medium. It pays more to buy another hard drive for backup than buying a deck of five or ten writable BD-R media. Our video production studio is producing enormous amount of content with every filming, and while we keep the edited stuff, keeping unedited footage is almost impossible due to large foot print. In that way, while we are ready for investing in 2TB drives, bear in mind that every owner should be careful if the unthinkable happens and the hard drive goes poof.

My personal advice to every owner of hard drive goes as follow: backup your most important stuff on three locations. Prioritize the importance of data. Given the size of sensitive data, sometimes, a 1GB USB stick can be more useful than a BD or tape drive.

• First tier should be your most important data – backup this online as well
• Second tier should be data such as private pictures, videos etc- for that, you can use optical media or another hard drive.
• Third tier should be something you can live without.

All in all, Google’s Gdrive cannot come soon enough. 2TB hard drive is available for 300 bucks. Excellent for your movie collection, but for anything sensitive, go with RAID5 and five drives.

The post 2TB hard disk drive is good and bad at the same time appeared first on VR World.

Label that nobody reads...

Intrigued by this one, we’ve called our friends and visited them and saw that many of computers that have Seagate drives on – have the SATA-I jumper on. Seeing that jumper on in Dell OptiPlex 700 series machines only goes to show that even large OEM vendors don’t care about user experience.
We learned from one Seagate representative in EMEA region that the company made the call to disable SATA-II by default, in order to enhance the compatibility with older motherboards. OEM vendors can ask for delivery of the hard drive with SATA 3.0 Gbps mode turned on, but so far, nobody asked for it. If you jump the gun from WD or Samsung to Seagate, make sure that you pull one small jumper from behind the drive… that jumper locks the drive to SATA-I mode and that’s it.

White jumper that limits the performance of your drive...by default.

I took several 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 and did a quick test in HDtach 3.0. It turns out that every hard drive experienced a major improvement in burst performance. Read speeds were positively affected as well.

This is performance of 250GB Barracuda 7200.10 by default (jumper on)...

...and this is what you get with the jumper removed. This is the same drive, same SATA cable, same power cable.

Given these numbers, I would advise that if you have a Seagate drive, check to see if your drive has SATA-I jumper on. If the jumper is there, remove it and experience the full speed of these silent drives.

Of course, if you have a motherboard with SATA 3.0 Gbps controller.

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