Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive review: Not the killer storage upgrade it could be

Western Digital Black2 $300.00 The WD Black2 is faster than a mechanical hard drive, but it's not nearly as fast as a comparably priced 500- to 512GB SSD. Its SSD write speed is particularly disappointing.

Western Digital’s Black2 combo drive—an SSD paired with an HDD—is a great concept: SSD speed and hard-drive capacity in a single 2.5-inch package. But disappointing SSD write performance, a hefty $300 price tag, and the availability of much faster 512GB SSDs for just a few dollars more make the Black2 a difficult sell for laptop upgraders—unless you absolutely need its 1.1TB capacity.

The Black2 is essentially a 120GB SSD married to a 1TB, 5400 rpm hard drive. The package 9mm high, so it will fit in many, but not all laptops (most newer thin-and-lights can accommodate only drives that are 7mm high). The SSD and HDD share the same drive interface, but they’re treated as separate entities, and Windows will assign different drive letters to each of them.

The SSD appears automatically when you attach the drive and boot up, but you must install a software driver to access the hard drive. This makes the Black2 unsuitable for NAS boxes and RAID. It is also not supported on the Mac OS.

The hard-drive half of WD's Black2 provides respectable performance--for a 5400 rpm drive, that is.

The drive delivers decent performance in every aspect aside from its SSD write performance, which is disappointingly slow. It wrote our 10GB collection of small files at just 150MBps, and it wrote our single 10GB file at only 151.1MBps. That’s faster than most mechanical hard drives, to be sure, but we had to dig all the way back to an obsolete Corsair Force drive with asynchronous NAND to fine a slower-writing SSD. 

The Black2’s SSD read performance was a little closer to what we expected: 362.5MBps for our 10GB collection of small files, and 362.1MBps for our single 10GB file. 

The write performance of the WDBlack2's SSD drive, on the other hand, is among the slowest we've encountered.

Turning to the drive’s mechanical side, the Black2 wrote our 10GB collection of small files to its hard drive at 59.5MBps, and it read those same files at 81.2MBps. The dual drive wrote our single 10GB file to its hard drive at 112.2MBps, and it read it back at 85.5MBps. Those are good numbers for a 5400 rpm drive.

The WD Black2 is faster than a plain hard drive, but it lags far behind a state-of-the-art SSDs. Price per gigabyte--27 cents for the Black2, versus 60 to 80 cents for a good SSD--sounds like a good deal. But if you want the genuine wow upgrade experience that a real SSD can deliver, you'll be happier with a similarly-priced 512GB SSD, such as the Samsung 840 EVO or the Toshiba Q Pro.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Spotify Killer? Hands-on with the New Rdio

The old Rdio interface.

The navigation panel has moved from the bulky toolbar at the top of the screen (pictured above) to a nicely rendered pane that runs the length of the left side of the screen (below). Below that sits an image of the cover art of the album you are currently listening to. The music control panel has also been moved from the left side of the screen to the bottom, adding to the new layout’s larger overall viewing area.

In truth, the improved Rdio UI bears a striking resemblance to Spotify’s interface, right down to the album artwork in the bottom left corner of the screen. Both services position their social features on the right side of the screen in a large information pane, while their music options and other settings sit opposite on the left. Of course, because Spotify is a piece of software that you download, the desktop version offers a larger viewing area than the Rdio’s web-based software.

Social Sharing

In addition to the improved interface, the reimagined Rdio offers enhanced social sharing. Now when you want to share a song with another user, you can just drag and drop it onto their name in the Your Network panel. When you drop a song on a user, Rdio gives you the option of sharing it with them via Facebook, Twitter or through email. Spotify, however, already offers this feature, which is to be expected of a service that prides itself on its social integration.

Rdio also offers a prepopulated list of influential artists, critics and brands to see what their favorites. That’s much easier than Spotify’s method of having you perform searches for individuals first.

Value

Rdio offers three subscription plans in addition to its free service. The standard $4.99 plan features unlimited web streaming and access via its the Rdio desktop app. The $9.99 plan gives you unlimited web and mobile streaming to all of your devices, as well as wireless syncing for offline listening. The Rdio Unlimited Family plan gives you unlimited access to both Rdio’s web, desktop and mobile apps for two to three accounts. The two-person plan costs $17.99, while the three person plan will run you $22.99.

Spotify offers two plans in addition to its free service. The first is a $4.99 plan that cuts out the ads that support the service’s free version. A second plan, which costs $9.99, includes access to the Spotify mobile app, as well as offline listening for your desktop and phone in addition to other features.

Features

The new Rdio includes the ability to create private playlists that you can share with a select group of people or no one at all, and the option to add entire albums to a playlist, something that Rdio’s creators said users had been clamoring for. Spotify also offers these features.

Rdio’s music quality still lags behind Spotify, offering a bitrate of 256 Kbps versus Spotify’s 320 Kbps. Spotify also offers a large community of apps including those available from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Last.fm.

In addition to listening on your laptop or mobile device, Rdio users can also rock out to their favorite tunes on their Sonos wireless sound system, in their car via the Pioneer AppRadio or on their Roku player, although connecting with Roku player requires that you sign up for the $9.99 plan.

Similarly, Spotify offers a you the ability to listen to music via your Sonos system, Boxee player, and a host of other systems. But like Rdio, playing music through these systems requires that you subscribe to Spotify’s $9.99 premium plan.

Bottom Line

Overall, the revamped Rdio is a huge step forward for the music service. The improved social sharing and enhanced user interface make using the service a pleasure. The company still has a ways to go before it can topple a household name like Spotify with its legion of users and apps, but we very much like the new direction.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here

QR Code Killer? Touchcode Opens Content By Tapping Paper to Screen

These days, QR Codes, those barcodes you can scan to launch a website or unlock exclusive content are everywhere from magazine pages to prepaid coffee cards. However, reading a QR code requires activating a camera app on a phone or tablet, turning your device around, shooting a picture, and then waiting for the appropriate app to interpret the code. A new technology promises to change all that, allowing you to unlock exclusive content in apps or web pages by simply touching printed materials like business cards or packages  to your screen.

Dubbed Touchcode, the new technology works by embedding  a thin layer of capacitive material in printed items like business cards, tickets, magazine pages, or product packaging. When you hold the paper to a capacitive touch screen, it acts like a set of invisible fingers tapping out a complex code that’s interpreted by a Touchcode-enabled app or website. Though the app should run on any multitouch-enabled, capacitive screen, it works best with panels that support at least 5-points of touch input. Like QR codes, Touchcodes can be used for launching web pages, enabling coupon codes, event ticketing, or even mobile payments. 

The brainchild of German startup Printechnologics, Touchcode is intended to be both cost effective and easy-to-implement. Printing houses can license the technology and easily add the inexpensive Touchcode layer to their production processes at a projected cost of less than a penny per unit printed.

To read the codes on a device, users will need to launch an app or site that’s capable or reading Touchcode. Rather than creating a universal Touchcode app, Printechnologics has an SDK that companies can use to build the functionality into their own apps on Android, iOS, or web apps with more platforms like Windows Phone 7 coming.

By building the Touchcode reader into their own applications, companies focus the spotlight on their own products rather than the technology behind them. As a user, you may not see the “Touchcode” name or branding on objects that use it. However, this also means that users will need to take the additional step of installing a new app or visiting a new web page for every Touchcode they encounter. The same reader app can scan any QR code in the world.  

Touchcode has already been deployed successfully in Europe where a German magazine called Iconist included a removable business card in a recent issue, which when touched to the screen in its iPad app, downloads a free digital edition. In Israel, PMI released a series of iSupergoal soccer trading cards which enable users to add players to their fantasy teams by simply rubbing the cards against a phone or tablet screen while a special app is running.

In the U.S., a number of companies are planning to release Touchcode-enabled products in the near future. However, when we met with a Printechnologics rep, the only non-embargoed English-language example he could show was a business card from 3M that launches special holiday content when touched to a tablet’s screen while the device is visiting a page of that company’s website. Using the card he gave us, we were able to use the 3M card on our own iPad.

Though we don’t expect Touchcode to replace QR codes or related technologies like RFID and NFC, it has a world of potential. Imagine visiting the supermarket, and holding your phone screen against the label of a pasta box to get recipes and a shopping list of related ingredients. Picture a magazine where you launch related videos for each story by holding your phone against a box on the page. Envision yourself getting a coupon card in the mail and touching it to your phone to enable a discount. By allowing users to read codes through the screen rather than the camera, all of these tasks feel more natural and intuitive. 

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here