Daily Reviews Summary 06/22/10 #2

ASRock are here with a new motherboard with the motive to take down the big boys. Will it? Let's find out...

The new small business-oriented laptop from Dell, the Vostro 3300, offers a pretty good feature set, including good performance and a compact, lightweight design. It's a good choice for users who are frequently on-the-go or want to have a laptop that's easy to bring to and from the office without too much fuss.

The drive we are looking at today in our labs is simply entitled the Vertex 2 and it is the true successor to the original VERTEX unit and is based around the affordable Sandforce 1200 controller which OCZ claim will outperform the Limited Edition. The idea is that OCZ will be dropping the price of the original Vertex drive for the mainstream marketplace while targeting performance users with the Vertex 2.

The ADATA S596 128GB SSD featuring a JMicron JMF612 controller has shown up on our doorstep for a test run. We've seen this controller before in other models and have a good idea what to expect but changes to the firmware could make a significant difference in the overall drive performance. Read on to see how it fares against other big name SSD brands!

After provisioning and the nominal space set aside by Windows, we see the yield left for user space on the ADATA S596 is about 112GB which is not unusual for a drive with 128GB of onboard NAND. Provisioning assists with performance preservation and drive maintenance such as using these as replacements for blocks that eventually go bad. Performance on the ADATA S596 is actually a little better than we expected as it generally posted better results than other JMicron drives we have tested and rivaled drives with other controllers in some tests...

Combining silence, convenience, and style, the Fusion Remote Black is an excellent enclosure for a home theater PC. With its special triple chamber design and dual 120mm fans, the Fusion Remote Black runs quietly and coolly. If that weren't enough, the Fusion Remote Black boasts an included remote control and media management software.

Disk storage can be attached to a server in a couple of ways, either directly (internally or externally) or via a dedicated Storage Area Network (SAN). Traditional SAN technology uses Fibre Channel hardware to link servers and storage together but in recent years there's been a move to cheaper commodity Ethernet to provide the infrastructure, running a protocol called iSCSI collectively, known as an IP SAN. On the downside SAN storage can be both expensive and difficult to manage, issues Data Robotics is claiming to address with the latest member of its Drobo storage family, the DroboElite.

The AMD 890FX is a new high-end chipset for AMD processors and the Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7 is a high-end motherboard based on this new chipset, bringing features like six PCI Express x16 slots, six SATA-600 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, Japanese solid capacitors, lots of overclocking features and more.

When the HTC Touch Pro2 initially became available, it was one of the best business-class smartphones on the market. Fast-forward to today, and we've seen quite a few new phones hit the market since the Touch Pro2 was released. Despite the availability of competing phones, however, the case could be made that the Touch Pro2 is still a worthy contender in the smartphone space.

We'll be taking a closer look at the Sprint variant of the Touch Pro2 in this review, but keep in mind similarly equipped models are also available from Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, and other carriers...