TechieGroups

Dust off your old-school shooter skills: a demo for the indie cyberpunk FPS Hard Reset is now on Steam.

Hard Reset comes from Flying Wild Hog, a Polish developer made up of talent from People Can Fly (Painkiller), CD Projekt Red (The Witcher) and City Interactive (Sniper: Ghost Warrior). You play an Army veteran tasked with defending humanity from a growing robotic threat.

In an effort to best serve their audience, Flying Wild Hog chose to make the title PC-exclusive and it shows. Their proprietary engine is capable of some truly stunning visuals, and the combat – full of circle-strafing and back-pedaling – harkens back to older id Software shooters. It also includes more modern weapon customization to keep things fresh.

Hard Reset releases at next Tuesday, but if the brief demo wins you over, you can save a little cash by pre-ordering for . 

Source: Steam

THE LATEST OVERPRICED CREATION from Apple’s Mac Mini line has gone under the scalple showing just how much over the odds fanbois are willing to pay for a shiny logo and some angular industrial design.

Apple’s Mac Mini is supposed to represent a low-cost Macintosh computer and years ago it was not a bad bit of kit for the price. However the latest version, which came out earlier this week, costs upwards of £529 and Apple thinks a £849 version can be used as a server. But after the chaps at Ifixit took the latest Mac Mini apart we were left to wonder whether you could even stuff £529 worth of tenners into an empty Mac Mini.

Being fair to Apple, its design department has been very clever in slimming down the Mac Mini further. No smoke and mirrors here, oh no, just remove the built in DVD writer and watch the fanbois fawn over ‘cleaner lines’, creating an opportunity for Apple to flog the same USB drive it offers Macbook Air customers for £66.

After taking the lid off Apple’s ‘mid 2011′ Mac Mini, the Ifixit boys found out that there is enough space for a second hard drive, though Apple doesn’t provide the connections required to hook one up to the motherboard. However Apple kindly offers fanbois the option to make use of this space by opting to have a 750GB SATA drive and a 256GB SSD for only £600, doubling the cost of a Mac Mini. At that sort of price the space inside the Mac Mini is priced higher per square inch than most of London’s Zone 1.

On the whole Apple has done a very good job of packaging the pint size money hole, and it should be commended that it can fit a 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 chip into such a small space.

What users can easily do, as is evident from Ifixit’s teardown, is upgrade RAM and the hard drive easily, which is probably more than what most fanbois would ever dare to do. That said, after spending so much to buy a Mac Mini, most fanbois won’t have the cash left over to upgrade anyway. µ

STORAGE VENDOR Western Digital (WD) has announced it is shipping its Scorpio Blue 1TB capacity hard drive for notebooks.

The 2.5in hard drive is super slim at just 9.5mm thick. The drive offers total storage capacity of 1TB by using two disk platters of 500GB each.

Matt Rutledge, VP and GM of Client Storage at WD said, “With the release of the 1 TB WD Scorpio Blue notebook drive in a 9.5 mm package, WD is able to offer the greatest storage capacity available for use in portable computing environments,”

The drive uses a 3Gbits/s SATA interface, spins at 5400RPM and has an 8MB cache. WD claims it is one of the quietest drives on the market and is both reliable and shock tolerant, making it perfect for notebooks and other portable devices.

Power consumption is low at 1.4W when the drive is reading or writing, which drops down to 0.18W when it is idle or in sleep mode. As well as being thin the drive is pretty light at just 110g.

WD said that the Scorpio Blue drive has “data-protection features that actively watch over valuable data”. It also has Advanced Format technology that WD claims optimises it for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard.

The WD Scorpio Blue hard drive is shipping now through various distributors and resellers with a guide price of 9. µ

STORAGE VENDOR Adaptec has released what it claims is the first hardware 6Gb/s SATA/SAS controller allowing users to mix hard drives and SSDs in an array.

Adaptec, known for its SCSI cards from years gone by, released its Series 6E controllers that is aimed at workstations and low-cost servers. The four-port 6405E and eight-port 6805E offer what Juergen Frick, senior product marketing manager at Adaptec claims is “the industry’s first hardware SATA3 controller”.The debate over hardware and software RAID controllers has been ongoing for many years, but while pseudo hardware RAID controllers found on high-end consumer motherboards do a perfectly good job, as Frick admits, heavy disk utilisation being able to offload hardware I/O to a controller saves significant CPU cycles, according to Frick. Another feature where Frick claims Adaptec’s latest entry-level boards increase performance is the 128MB cache that is on the controller, with Frick claiming, “caching still outperforms SSDs”.

As Adaptec’s four-port 6405E and eight-port 6805E are intended for workstations there are RAID 0, 1 and 10 modes, with both boards having the aforementioned 128MB DDR2-800 cache. The four-port card has only a PCI-Express 1x interface with bandwidth capped at 400MB/s. Asked why this was the case when SATA3 SSDs are already pushing upwards of 500MB/s, Frick said that ultimate performance was dependant on workload and that Adaptec’s customers asked for a PCI-Express 1x card to provide connectivity and the chance to access high I/Os per second data rates. Frick admitted that the eight-port 6805E, which has a PCI-Express 4x interface and a throughput of 1600MB/s, is the card you want if you want high streaming performance.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Adaptec’s 6-series boards is the ability to mix hard drives and SSDs, with Frick saying, “Customers still have doubts over fully relying on SSDs”. Frick was referring to the ongoing concerns about SSD controller firmware. Adaptec’s Hybrid RAID software allows users to set an SSD as the boot drive, mirror the SSD on a hard drive and use the rest of the hard drive as a different partition.

As to this mix and match RAID capability, Adaptec has said that it now tests “desktop-grade” hard drives to see how they operate in 24×7 environments. Frick explained that these drives are the standard drives that are not offered with a ‘RAID edition’ sticker. Frick went on to say that Adaptec has tested over 350 drives to ensure compatibility with the controller.

Although motherboard chipset vendors have done a lot to improve the performance of their pseudo-RAID devices, there’s little doubt that for commercial environments controller boards from firms like Adaptec, Areca and LSI are still extremely popular, and for good reason. Not only do they offer higher performance and better customer support, but driver support is considerably better, with Adaptec having open source drivers for both FreeBSD and Linux.

Adaptec said that customers will be able to order the 6405E and 6805E from today with prices ranging from £120 to £175.

STORAGE VENDOR Samsung has launched its Spinpoint M8 1TB hard drive, available for 9 (£79).

The Spinpoint M8 is an internal disk drive made for notebooks, so it’s just 9.5mm thick. It uses two platters of 500GB each to provide 1TB capacity and has a SATA interface to provide 3Gbits/s data transfer.

Samsung said the M8 has an 8MB buffer along with Ecoseek and Noiseguard technology to maintain minimal noise levels.

For security the M8 has had “A redesign of the overall structure ensures enhanced shock resistance to protect the disk from physical fracture and data loss.”

According to Samsung the high capacity was achieved by using advanced format technology. This uses the space more efficiently by raising the data storage density per unit area.

A reduction in the number of components, like heads, means a seven per cent increase in operation speeds and an eight per cent decrease in power demands.

CH Lee, VP of storage strategic marketing for Samsung said, “The new Spinpoint M8 line-up supports the ongoing growth curve for high density data storage densities, especially as it raises the bar to exceed terabyte density levels in the mobile computing space.” µ

INSECURITY FIRM Symantec has warned PC users about a Trojan that screws around with a computer’s files to make it look like there is a hard drive failure.

Fake hard disk cleanup utilities and defragmentation tools have existed since the end of last year, but the security firm said emerging threats actually make critical changes on your computer to make it look as though the hard drive is failing.

Symantec showed how criminals are using a combination of attacks to convince users that their computer is failing. It used an example called Trojan.Fakefrag, which is dropped onto a computer, usually through a drive-by download.

Trojan.Fakefrag does a number of things to a Windows PC. As well as fake hardware failure messages, it can move the files in the ‘all users’ folder to a temporary location and hide files in the current user section. It can also change your background image, disable the task manager and delete registry entries.

Symantec researcher Eoin Ward said, “It does a really convincing job of making it appear as though something is wrong – the failure messages look just like something Windows would display. Plus, when it “deletes” files from your desktop, it does so in a very prominent way.”

Once the user is freaked out enough about what’s happening to their PC, they might well click on a message and launch a Windows recovery application, which is now linked on the desktop and start menu. It offers an ‘UltraDefragger’ utility available at the ‘bargain’ price of .

Ward said, “Fortunately with Trojan.Fakefrag all the files are still on your hard drive. A quick search will find anything you need – after you run an up-to-date antivirus scan to delete the Trojan of course.” µ

HARD DRIVE MAKER Western Digital has released 2.5TB and 3TB hard drives aimed at storing video.

Western Digital, which recently purchased rival storage vendor Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, announced that its AV-GP series of hard disk drives now come in 2.5TB and 3TB models. Both drives have the firm’s Silkstream technology, which Western Digital claims can capture 12 simultaneous high definition video streams.

As its AV-GP drives are intended to run 24×7, Western Digital quotes a 1,000,000 hour mean time between failures and not the usual 300,000 load/unload cycles. The firm also spins the platters at somewhere between 5,200 and 5,700 RPM. However unlike its widely respected Black edition hard drives, the AV-GP units come with a three year warranty.

Western Digital is pitching its AV-GP drives for use in personal video recorders (PVR) and surveillance systems. For consumers it’s debatable as to what advantage they will see by using the firm’s specialised drives over its standard units in single drive PVRs.

Western Digital promotes its Silksteam firmware as being the major difference that, the firm claims, supports the SATA streaming command set, but its likely users will only see major gains on streaming servers used in surveillance applications.

Western Digital’s 2.5TB AV-GP drive should be available for around £85 while the 3TB unit should set you back about £110. µ

HARD DRIVE MAKER Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) has released a pair of USB 3.0 portable hard drives with cloud based storage.

HGST updated its Touro range of portable hard drives with USB 3.0 connectivity for both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch models. The hard drives also come with 3GB of online cloud storage that will allow users to backup and share files.

HGST’s Touro Desk Pro comes in 1TB, 2TB and 3TB capacities while the Touro Mobile Pro is available in 500GB and 750GB capacities. Both models support USB 3.0 and are backwards compatible with USB 2.0. They are available in a piano black finish with HGST offering a two year warranty on all units.

As for HGST’s cloud storage, the firm offers customers the opportunity to upgrade the 3GB to 250GB for £30 () a year. We asked HGST what will happen to its cloud storage service once the firm becomes part of Western Digital, however HGST was unable to get back to us by press time.

HGST was the first company to build in cloud storage on its portable hard drives, and it even has IOS applications to retrieve data from its cloud storage service. While it is a very welcome addition allowing for easy backup and sharing, users might be wary of using a service that is tied to a particular manufacturer.

HGST has priced its Touro Mobile Pro from £67 (0) and the Touro Desk Pro from £79 (0). µ

HARD DRIVE MAKERS Seagate and Samsung have struck a deal to combine their hard drive businesses in a £845 million agreement.

This news comes only a day after we reported that Samsung was looking to sell its hard drive division. Though Seagate hasn’t completely bought Samsung’s hard drive operation, the deal between the two major players will see Seagate paying Samsung and will be split half and half between stock and cash.

The agreement means that Samsung will supply Seagate with NAND flash memory for use in its solid state drives and other products. Seagate will supply Samsung with disk drives for use in its range of products including PCs and laptops.

The two companies will look to co-develop enterprise storage products and extend the patent cross license agreement that already exists after a joint development agreement signed in August of 2010.

As part of the deal Samsung will receive significant equity ownership in Seagate of 45.2 million shares, which works out to 9.6 per cent ownership. A shareholder agreement has also been made under which a Samsung executive will be nominated to join Seagate’s board of directors.

The companies expect to close the transactions by the end of this year.

Seagate says the move will give the companies an advantage in future product development, accelerate time-to-market for new products and put them in a better position to compete in growing market areas such as mobile computing, cloud computing and solid state storage.

Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate said, “With these agreements, we expect to achieve greater scale and deliver a broader range of innovative storage products and solutions to our customers, while facilitating our long-term relationship with Samsung.” µ

JAPANESE COMPUTER AND ELECTRONICS MAKER Toshiba has announced a series of self-encrypting hard drives that can wipe data if security is compromised, which it claims is a world first.

The MK6461GSYG family of hard drives includes five 2.5-inch models ranging in capacity from 150GB to 640GB. They are designed for use with copiers, printers, point-of-sale systems, computers and various other IT devices.

What differentiates these drives from others on the market is self-encryption and wipe technology, which can invalidate all data on the system when the drive is removed, powered down or connected to an unauthorised system. This will prevent data from being lost or stolen, since the drive cannot leave its designated installation without triggering the wipe feature.

Toshiba has been working on its wipe technology since August of last year, developing the automatic invalidation of data when a drive is removed or powered down, but the ability to trigger a data wipe when the drive is connected to a device that has not been given authorisation is the latest development in ensuring that sensitive data is kept secret. This will allow the drive to be moved without wiping data, but restricts access to that data to authorised systems only.

This development makes data invalidation a much speedier process compared to traditional methods, which often take hours of overwriting.

Toshiba plans to add the technology into its self-branded PCs, printers and point-of-sale systems.

Samples of the self-encrypting drives will be available from the end of April, with mass production expected at the end of June. Prices have yet to be revealed. µ