Hands on: Upgrade products round-up

It’s a Raid
The heart of my storage system consists of a Raid 5 array managed by a Promise Supertrak EX8350 card. Given three or more disks, this delivers a great balance of capacity, redundancy and ­ ­ – thanks to the hardware controller ­ – ­ decent read-and-write performance.

The card has been superseded by the EX8650, which costs £250, but for uncompromised Raid 5 performance, it’s the way to go. In terms of data loss, Raid can only protect against disk failure. For backup, ensure you have a copy of your data on optical media.

Portable storage
Optical media is all very well, but the only medium that can back up the amount of data we have on our hard disks these days is another hard disk.

While I have been known to lug around 3.5in disks, anyone who wants to travel light will be happy to sacrifice capacity and pay a bit extra for the portability of a 2.5in drive. I’ve been using a Seagate Free Agent Go drive, which may only offer a maximum capacity of 250GB for around £60, but does so in a small package that can be powered by USB ports.

Double HD
Blu-ray may have won the war, but there are still those with a collection of HD-DVD titles they want to play. The beauty of a media PC is its ability to house multiple optical drives to support different formats, but you should consider one drive that does it all.
LG is one of the few companies offering both HD-DVD and Blu-ray compatibility on one drive.

If you only want to play the HD formats, then the GGC-H20L at around £70 will do the trick; it’ll also read and write CDs and DVDs. The GGW-H20L adds Blu-ray burning capabilities at around twice the price.

Y-Cam Knight
Finally, the Y-Cam Knight is an IP camera that connects to wired or wireless networks, and includes infra-red illumination to see in complete darkness. Costing around £125, it’s ideal for monitoring your home or business. If you’ve been impressed by any PC gear, we’d love to hear about it.

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