News for Wednesday, 21 March 2007

Our friends from the AMUG have published (as usual) an excellent test of the EnhanceBox E8-ML SATA Hot Swap Multilane 8-Bay HD enclosure coupled to a HighPoint RocketRAID 2322 to create a very fast RAID 5 setup for the Apple Mac Pro.
Performance is simply amazing: read and write performance of 420MB/sec while redundancy provided by RAID 5 was successfully tested .
A "must read" article: Add an Eight Bay RAID 5 to the Apple Mac Pro

Anandtech could test the new Hitachi HD 3.5" 1TB 7200rpm. This HD is based on 5 plates of 200GB each, making it the biggest HD model. It uses perpendicular recording and features a 32MB cache.
If you imagine that such a large storage capacity would have a negative impact on performance, then you are wrong! The 7K1000 has performance levels very close to those obtained with a Raptor 150!
In addition, the 7K1000 is reported as a rather silent HD, so it could quickly become a "must have" HS, and a favorite BTO option for numerous hardware.
Last but not least, the real capacity once formatted is "only" 930GB. The price should be US$399 (probably the same in euro).

With millions of consumers, Adobe owns a real power in its field but also on the entire IT market. Apple faced it as most Mac users relying on Adobe solutions have delayed the purchase of a Mac Pro till Adobe releases native MacIntel or Universal binaries versions of its blockbusters applications? Some analysts predict that Apple will experience a massive request for Pro hardware models when the native CS3 will be released, but it is still not clear if it will compensate the currently lower than expected sales of Mac Pro.
Adobe is also going to pressure Microsoft. Indeed, it has officially announced that Vista compatibility and support will be available only via update to be released by mid 2007, but it will not apply for all applications. New version of Adobe key applications are being developed, and will then be Vista compatible. hereafter is an example of such details:

Will Adobe update currently available products to support Windows Vista?
Adobe has an extensive portfolio of products, each with different schedules for fully supporting Windows Vista. For example, Adobe has already released free updates to Adobe Photoshop Elements (version 5.0.2) and Adobe Premiere Elements (version 3.0.2) to deliver full compatibility with Windows Vista, and it currently plans to release a free update to Adobe Acrobat 8 and Adobe Reader 8 in the first half of 2007 to support Windows Vista. On the other hand, Adobe is already preparing to release the next versions of its professional creative products, including Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, and After Effects, in the Spring and Summer 2007 and does not plan to issue updates to current versions of those products for Windows Vista compatibility. For more details, please see specific products sections in this FAQ.

So to get the CS3, you will have to migrate to Vista and a more powerful hardware. In addition, Adobe Acrobat is not fully compatible with Office 2007, and a fix is not expected before mid-2007. Is it a new step in the war between Adobe and Microsoft around the PDF format and its modified adoption by Microsoft in Office 2007?

Plextor has always been able to innovate among CD and DVD burner manufacturers, and while the DVD market seems saturated and being EOL with the blue laser-based media and drive finally emerging; Plextor released a new interesting product: a 5.25" dual bay optical drive solution.

The PX-DB600 features 2 bays able to accommodate a slim line slot loaded optical drive each. The DVD burner is able to write DVD+/-R at 8x, dual layer DVD+/-R at 4x, DVD+RW at 8x, DVD-RW at 6x, DVD-RAM at 5x, CD-R at 24x, CD-RW at 24x. It can of course read DVD and CD. While the price remains unknown we can expect it to be higher than a standard model.

Toshiba Matsushita announced the availability of its new LED-based LCD display models.
Sizes range from 8.9 to 13.3" and panels are 2.5 mm-thick while consuming 50% less energy than standard LCD panel of the same size.

Such display can not be adopted in the current Apple notebook offer, either too small for the MacBook Pro, or too expensive for the 13.3" MacBook.
But, one could imagine that the 13.3" panel could be used by Cupertino in its long rumored sub-notebook model, a MacBook pro 13.3". In addition, such notebook could also include a 16 or 32GB SSD, and with an ultra low voltage Core 2 Duo, it could easily be used for 6 hours and more. So, what about the availability? WWDC 2007?

During the CeBIT, several graphic card manufacturers were presenting new notebook-dedicated models based on the NVidia GeForce 8xxx Go architecture.

As usual, the offer will include 3 models corresponding to the targeted market (entry-level, mid-range and high-end), and featuring GPU with the respective increasing performance level. The photo shows one model using the MXM format, the same one used on the iMac24" motherboard.
So, we could see in the future such new mobile GPUs available in our iMac, and if not we will try to graft them in previous iMac models.