Western Digital Bumps it Up! (With Pic)

Western Digital has bumped up the 10,000 RPM drives with a solution for those wanting larger capacity on the traditionally small capacity storage area. with many drives on the market now in the 1TB range at a reasonable cost, it makes sense to take a look at bumping up your internal and external storage however these SATA drives generally spin at 7200RPM. This is a jump over the old 5400RPM technology in the past and combined with large cache size, now at a standard 16MB cache, the speeds to access your data and write to the drives has significantly increased.

I have always been a fan of 10,000RPM technology however because of the higer spin rate on the platters, more heat is generated and thus the size has usually been reserved to a max of 160GB. The announcement this morning from Western Digital almost doubles the capacity and seems to focus it's attention on the gaming market with the VelociRaptor. The 10,000RPM drive with a 16MB Cache features a capcity of 300GB. The drive itself is a 2.5inch form factor however it is wrapped by what Western Digital calls the IcePack taking it to a 3.5 inch factor, commen with most internal drives today.

Alienware will have the VelociRaptor in the ALX Desktop by the end of the month of April and will also sell direct the drives through its website. The WD3000GLFS will also be available through the WD store at http://www.shopwd.com/ The cost for the drive will be around $299 which should satisfy most performance seekers for Gaming, Digital Audio and Video Editing and overall speed of your data read and writes. For more info, check out the WD Website

Andy

Call of Duty 4

Well, even though we had to send back the Alienware ALX this week... I'm still pretty excited about getting my computer back. (Thanks Andy). So far I've installed ONLY the stuff I absolutely need on it. With that being said, I'm still able to run Call of Duty 4 on the computer with a NVIDIA GeForce 6600 and 1GB Memory and with my settings on low, the game does not run bad at all.

I still wouldn't mind getting another gig of memory in this thing until I get a new computer which I really need. The Dell I have is now 5 years old. Think it's about time for a new one.

Anybody have some DDR memory laying around they want to sell me?

Alienware ALX - Tech Support

I've been testing out the Alienware for a month now and have not had any real major problems with it... It really is an awesome system and it's been working great for me. If I had the money, I would buy this big monster machine.

So speaking of BIG... my feet... LOL... by accident knocked into the power cord under the table that the Alienware is sitting on and shut down the system completely. Well, when I went to go start it back up, nothing happened. I shut down the computer and unplug everything from the back, boot it back up... Nothing.

So I'm thinking, "Great, I few more days with the Alienware... and I busted it!!" So, the next thing I do is call the "tech expert" - Andy. He tells me to do the same thing. Unplug, Plug. Still Nothing. The next thing he says is to look for the "CMOSS" jumper on the board. Well, hell if I can find it. I look and look. Can't see anything that says "CMOSS". He tells me to power if off and wait.

After that, I decide to call Alienware ALX tech support and PRAY I don't get anybody from that "place"... you know the one. Thankfully, I don't. The tech support gentleman walked me through finding the "jumper" to re-set the motherboard. That literally took about 30 minutes. (definitely need some glasses). After finally finding it, he told me how to re-set it. I did that. We plugged the power cord back in, booted the system and then he walked me through the BIOS set up and - viola!!, the computer came back up and is now running beautifully again.

I was on the phone with Alienware ALX tech support for 45 minutes. The tech support gentleman (Antonio from Costa Rica) that helped me was so patient and helpful. So, I'm not only a fan of the Alienware ALX, I am also a fan of their tech support. I asked Antonio if they had a "feedback" form to fill out about the tech support call. He told me to send it to feedback@alienware.com and I would be able to send my feedback for the tech support call.

So, the moral of this story... if you have BIG feet, watch where you're stretching them!! LOL. But if you do happen to stretch them to far, hopefully, you'll get the same great help I did!!