In our teaser for this review at the end of last year I posited the idea that perhaps a single drive NAS might be the best way of making use of the new, monstrous capacity drives like Seagate’s latest 16TB Iron Wolf. Domestically, that is. And for small businesses. Enterprise is a different matter. Let’s test this hypothesis. The single-bay DS120j is pretty much the identical twin of the DS119j we reviewed last year. The… Now read on…
Portable USB drives—the kind based on 2.5″ hard disk that you can slip in your pocket—have always been a huge convenience if you use more than one computer in different locations. But they’ve often struck me as problematic in several ways. Small rotating drives don’t travel well. Drop them more than a few inches while they’re in use and your data could be toast. Yes, rotating drives are considerably cheaper per gigabyte than USB sticks… Now read on…
We reviewed the first Amazon Fire TV Stick back in 2015 and praised it for being a cheap “disposable” add-on that could turn a regular TV into a Smart TV. The problem with so-called “Smart TVs”, we argued, is that while the screen technology should be good for at least five years, the electronic smarts get outdated very quickly. Fine if manufacturers keep their TV firmware regularly updated. But they don’t. So buy a TV… Now read on…
The serial AT attachment interface, or SATA (pronounced “sarta”) has been with us for nearly twenty years as a means of connecting storage devices like hard drives and optical discs to our computers. At the turn of the century, it replaced the earlier parallel ATA interface, a clunky arrangement using thick ribbon cables that took up a good deal of space inside our devices. SATA has stood us in good stead, but it’s worth reminding… Now read on…
A couple of months ago I slipped a mention of the new AZIO Retro Classic Keyboard into my review of the Varidesk ProPlus 36, telling you I’d follow up when the Bluetooth version of that keyboard arrived. This is that promised review. Keyboards have been much in the news of late, largely on account of manufacturers like (and also mainly) Apple. In the race towards ever thinner, ever lighter laptops, designers have been taking risks… Now read on…
We tend to take them for granted, even though we spend a lot of our working day and (at least in my case) playing time in front of them. Monitors matter. It’s easy to think that now we’ve assigned the cathode ray tube to the dustbin of history, all those old stories of damage to health have been put to rest. Experts assure us there’s no convincing scientific evidence that today’s flat screens are intrinsically… Now read on…
