Here a roundup of todays review's and articles:

54 HDDs and SSHDs, reviewed: the best drives for your desktop, laptop, and NAS
ADATA HD710A USB 3.0 Rugged Portable HDD For Mac Review
Apple MacBook 12-Inch (Early 2015) Review: The Laptop Reinvented?
Asus N550JK review
Fedora 22 review - Fiascoed
First look: OS X El Capitan brings a little Snow Leopard to Yosemite
Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming 6 GB
Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5P Motherboard Review
HP Pro Slate 12 Review
Kingston 32GB DataTraveler Mini 3.0(DTM30/32GB)
Lexar JumpDrive M20 Mobile USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review
Massdrop Infinity Keyboard
Mind your life memories: Why owning a real camera matters
Mushkin Reactor 512GB Solid State Drive Review
Tesoro Lobera Spectrum Keyboard Review
The Acer Aspire R 13 Review: Convertible Notebook With A Twist
Thrustmaster TH8A Review
Zotac CI321Nano Barebones System Review
ZOTAC ZBOX P1320 Mini-PC Review

54 HDDs and SSHDs, reviewed: the best drives for your desktop, laptop, and NAS

Now that the prices of SSDs have dropped to well below 50 cents per GB, we expect that only few Hardware.Info readers will still want to use a conventional hard drive as their primary storage device. We still can't quite live without them, however, because with prices of around 5 cents per GB, hard drives still remain a much cheaper way of storing large amounts of data.

Hard drives haven't seen all that much innovation during the last few years; manufacturers are primarily focusing on increasing the capacity of their products by increasing the data density of the magnetic disks (the so-called platters) found within the drives. At the time of writing, the largest platters that Western Digital and their subsidiary HGST use for their 3.5″ drives have a capacity of 1200 GB each. Through combining five such platters in a 3.5″ enclosure, they are capable of manufacturing drives with a storage capacity of 6 TB, the second largest drives featured in this round-up. Competitor Toshiba currently uses platters with a maximum capacity of 1000 GB. The platters with the largest capacity can be found in the Seagate Archive HDD 8TB: due to the use of a new technology, Seagate managed to cram 1333 GB on a single platter. More on this later.

Read full article @ Hardware.Info

ADATA HD710A USB 3.0 Rugged Portable HDD For Mac Review

ADATA is very well known for their storage products which range from SSDs and thumb drives to memory cards and RAM modules. They also have a comprehensive line of external storage drives for nearly every application. We all know how fragile some external drives can be so they offer a line of durable drives meant to take the rigors of mobility in stride without putting your precious data at risk. For the mac users, ADATA has a version of this drive just for you with the HD710A Waterproof / Dustproof / Shock-Resistant USB 3.0 External Hard Drive. Read on to see how it performs!

Read full article @ Legit Reviews

Apple MacBook 12-Inch (Early 2015) Review: The Laptop Reinvented?

The engineering wizards at Apple have designed a laptop that's lighter than Air...the MacBook Air, that is. It's the new MacBook (early 2015 edition), a forward-thinking laptop that measures just 11.04 inches (W) by 7.74 inches (D) by 0.14-0.52 inches (H), and weighs a mere 2.03 pounds. The super thin and light profile is what prompted Apple's clever tagline, "Light. Years ahead."

At 2.38 pounds, the 11.6-inch MacBook Air is slightly heavier than the 12-inch MacBook we'll be showing you here. It's also marginally thicker at its highest point (0.68 inches), though a tad thinner where it tapers off (0.11 inches). Comparing the size and weight of the two really comes down to splitting hairs and isn't all that interesting in and of itself.

What's far more intriguing perhaps, is what the addition of a third laptop line means for Apple and consumers, and how the new MacBook differentiates itself from the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro...

Read full article @ HotHardware

Asus N550JK review

An £800 "entertainment laptop" with Core i7 processing and discrete graphics. The Asus N550JK laptop didn't get off to an awe-inspiring start, and there were obvious reasons why: last year's UK model carried a mediocre 1,366x768 display that single-handedly spoilt what was an otherwise stylish design.

There's good news, though, as Asus's 2015 revision is back in contention courtesy of an upgraded 1080p display that's far more appealing for a 15.6in machine.

Read full article @ Hexus

Fedora 22 review - Fiascoed

Here's a largely negative review of Fedora 22 Twenty-Two 64-bit Workstation edition with the Plasma desktop, covering live session, installation, and some post-install checks, including Wireless (2.4GHz and 5GHz), Bluetooth, Samba sharing and printing, partitioning, updates, easyLife, UEFI & hardware compatibility problems, failed boot, and more. Not much more really. Enjoy, sort of.

Read full article @ Dedoimedo

First look: OS X El Capitan brings a little Snow Leopard to Yosemite

We spent a week with the first beta to save you from breaking your laptop.

Read full article @ Arstechnica

Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming 6 GB

Gigabyte's GTX 980 G1 Gaming comes with a large overclock out of the box, which lets the card surpass GeForce GTX Titan X in performance, at a much lower price. The cooler is also better than the reference heatsink and avoids the 84°C thermal limit at all times. It also turns off its fans in idle and light gaming.

Read full article @ techPowerUp

Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5P Motherboard Review

Retrofitted with Gigabytes new pin-enhanced socket, the X99-Gaming 5P is targeting enthusiast gamers with an eye for multi-GPU configurations and an ear for high-quality audio hardware. Can the red and black-themed design appeal to gamers shopping for a mid-priced X99 motherboard?

Read full article @ KitGuru

HP Pro Slate 12 Review

An excellent tablet with the ability to turn ink-on-paper notes into on-screen text. Powerful and innovative, the HP Pro Slate 12 makes a confident entry into the productivity tablet market with the ability to turn handwritten, ink-on-paper notes into on-screen text.

Pros:
Decent performance, digital transcribing works surprisingly well, pen/stylus included, long battery life

Cons:
Reflective screen, older version of Android

Read full article @ V3

Kingston 32GB DataTraveler Mini 3.0(DTM30/32GB)

The Kingston 32GB USB 3.0 DataTraveler Mini is a no frills, NAND flash based USB 3.0 thumb drive. Along with the no frills approach comes a no frills price, currently running $13.99. When you think about it, that’s a lot of storage for a pretty small price and comes out to 43.7¢ per GB. The DataTraveler Mini 3.0 is suitable for uses where space on the chassis is tight, pocket storage, briefcase carry along or substituting for that non-existent optical drive on a lot of laptops and minis.

Read full article @ Bjorn3D

Lexar JumpDrive M20 Mobile USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

The last USB 3.0 OTG flash drives we have tested were sporting a smaller footprint and also needed extra protective covers for avoiding damages to their connectors. In this case, the chassis is indeed bigger but no extra accessories are needed, while we can switch from one interface to another just by working with the slider.

Read full article @ Madshrimps

Massdrop Infinity Keyboard

While you can read the full backstory for the Infinity on Massdrop at this link I did still want to talk a little about it. If you follow any of the mechanical keyboard communities you have most likely seen MANY different custom keyboards be designed and have small group buys. But typically when it comes to a custom keyboard you are limited by a few different PCBs or you have to hand wire the keyboard. Massdrop set out to put together a keyboard of their own as well. To do this they paired up with a few key people in the keyboard community (Jacob Alexander (HaaTa), Gennadiy Nerubayev (Parak), Brandon Muzzin (OverKill), and Jacob Rus (Jacobolus)) as well as putting their voting system to use. They let the community post up their design ideas and then vote on them to come up with a base key layout and from there they started to design the Infinity.

To keep costs down they designed the baseplate to also be the case with a unique bent design. Later on after community feedback they did add in an option for a standard baseplate as well. For the PCB they had to design a PCB that could support two different styles of bottom row, one US standard and the other a Japanese layout. For a controller rather than using the Teensy they used a chip based on the MCHCK and they switched the framework over to Keyboard Layout Language (KLL). KLL asks more like a keyboard BIOS and provides a standard firmware for all future Massdrop builds. That is because KLL is ambivalent to layout changes. It is also the reason they went with the Infinity name because the keyboard can be programed with an infinite number of layers. This allows for an extreme amount of customization when using the Infinity Configurator or through command line.

Read full article @ LanOC Reviews

Mind your life memories: Why owning a real camera matters

Google recently said it best: photos are more than just pixels. They’re moments in time we’ll never want to forget. Depending on your age and / or life experiences, that may not mean much to you at this point. Having crossed into my 30s a few years back and having already lost both parents and a best friend, it certainly resonates with me. Memories fade but the images you capture with friends and family last a lifetime.

Read full article @ Techspot

Mushkin Reactor 512GB Solid State Drive Review

Today we are taking a look at another solid state drive from Mushkin. This one comes from their Reactor line and is the 512GB version. In the past Mushkin primarily used SandForce controllers with their solid state drives, but this time they have gone with Silicon Motion’s SM2246EN controller. This controller from what we’ve seen is very solid and performs without issue. They have teamed this controller with Micron’s 16nm MLC NAND. This combination gives the 512GB version of the drive a sequential read speed of 560 MB/s and sequential write speed of 460 MB/s with 71K IOPS read and 75K IOPS write. Let’s see what this drive can do.

Read full article @ ThinkComputers.org

Tesoro Lobera Spectrum Keyboard Review

Tesoro has been releasing so many RGB keyboards since the tail end of last year that it is hard to keep up. Today we are going to be looking at the Lobera Spectrum, which takes a different approach compared to the Excalibur keyboard we last tested.

Read full article @ KitGuru

The Acer Aspire R 13 Review: Convertible Notebook With A Twist

The world of the convertible notebook has come a long way in just a couple of years, but we seem to have settled in on two basic types of convertible devices. There are the tablet style devices where the display can be removed from the keyboard and used separately, and there are the notebook style devices where the keyboard can be rotated around and under the display in order to act like a tablet. Acer has decided to try something different with the Aspire R 13 which features their Ezel Aero hinge.

Read full article @ Anandtech

Thrustmaster TH8A Review

Recently we introduced the Thrustmaster T500RS steering wheel set, which has proven excellently in our review. Although modern race cars today are usually either automatic or have paddle shifters on the steering wheel, one wishes nevertheless now and then a PC shift knob to get the feeling of an old school race car. Exactly this is what Thrustmaster offers with their TH8A Shifter.

Read full article @ OcInside.de

Zotac CI321Nano Barebones System Review

Today we are taking a look at one of Zotac’s latest ZBOX CI321 nano barebones system that is packing a dual-core 2961Y CPU. Something that makes this CI321 nano stand out of the crowd is that it carries dual Gigabit LAN and is completely silent with its passively cooled design. With the inclusion of an onboard IR receiver, this makes it an interesting option for a silent HTPC. With it being a barebones kit, you can use some memory or 2.5″ drives that you have on hand to keep the final build costs down. There has been a lot of growth in the mini PC market and Zotac has been in it for a long time with its ZBOX lineup.

Read full article @ eTeknix

ZOTAC ZBOX P1320 Mini-PC Review

The humble microchip can be considered one of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century. It allowed electrical devices requiring some form of intelligent control to be shrunk down in size rather than using large, clunky relays. Over the course of time, computers have gotten ever more powerful while reducing in size. Generally speaking, the main limitation to a computers size was the heat being produced and thus alot of space was taken up by heatsinks. Today we see the humble slivers of silicon being extremely powerful but also very efficient giving off less heat. This has allowed manufacturers to decrease the size of components that once took up a large room down to something that comfortably fits in your pocket.

Read full article @ Vortez