AMP Aviator-2 SSD, Space Dock, Sapphire 5850 Toxic, HP Airlife Smartbook - Gadget Update, February - 3rd Week

Welcome to this week’s edition of the MacPCWiz Gadget Update. Hope you’ve had a good week so far. Here we go with the gadgets!

Active Media Products launch USB 3.0 External SSD’s

Active Media Products' Aviator-2 Super Speed USB 3.0 SSDs

If you want some of that Super Speed USB 3.0 action, check out the new Aviator-2 External SSDs (Solid State Drives) from Active Media Products. Combine the read/write speed of SSDs and the bandwith of USB 3.0, and you get one smoking hot drive. The Aviator-2 SSD comes in two versions, one with 64GB of storage and another with a capacity of 128GB. The former can operate at speeds of 230MB/s when reading and 160 MB/s when writing, whereas the latter reaches read/write speeds of 230/120 MB/s. Of course, the drives are backward compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 ports, although, in such scenarios, transfer speeds will, naturally, be limited by the interface’s bandwidth. So if your laptop or netbook still does not have USB 3.0, then you may just as well go with these portable hard drives.

First seen at Softpedia.com.

Datel Space Dock for adding HDD’s to your PS3 or Xbox 360

Datel's Space Dock - external Hard Drive dock

Adding a hard drive to your Xbox and PS3 is no easy matter. Until, that is, Datel came up with this nifty gadget called the Space Dock. The Space Dock, available in PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, accepts 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA HDDs (up to 1TB) just like cartridges — some old school NES cartridge-plugging action for you there.  Then we can only assume that there is an automatic formatting and file install process that allows stock drives to be instantly compatible with your PS3 or Xbox 360. Once installed, the drive mounts in your system as a Mass Storage Device to backup saved games (a feature that looks exclusive to PS3 version), play movies, and other cool stuff.  Of course, the PS3 uses Blu-ray discs, a good optical media storage option, but it doesn’t have Blu-ray burner capability.

You can also use it as an external Hard Drive dock for your PC, to transfer or back up files, since the formatting structure is really just FAT32.

First seen at Dvice.com.

Sapphire’s monster Radeon 5850 Toxic Edition runs close to stock 5870′s

Sapphire Radeon HD5850 Toxic Edition - overclocked monster

Since September last year, AMD/ATI has been releasing an ever-growing line of DirectX 11 graphics cards,  with no real response from rival Nvidia. (Nvidia’s next-generation “Fermi” cards are slated to appear soon, according to the company’s CES 2010 announcements).

This video card has 2 DVI ports, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort - all the HD viewing you need

The Radeon HD 5850 was actually one of the first DirectX 11 cards, alongside the Radeon HD 5870. That has given Sapphire a fair amount of time to tweak the card for maximum performance, and the company has done a great job. The Sapphire Toxic Edition card ups the core clock speed to 765MHz (from 725MHz in the stock model) and also overclocks the 1GB of DDR5 memory from 1,000MHz to 1,125MHz. That may not sound like much, but it helped push the card’s performance, in both synthetic and real-world gaming tests, surprisingly close to the more-expensive Radeon HD 5870.

For enthusiast gamers with a substantial—though finite—graphics budget, the overclocked Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic Edition is a great buy for the performance it offers at its $319 price point.

First seen at Computershopper.com.

The HP Compaq Airlife 100 3G Smartbook  – [smartphone + netbook]

The HP Compaq Ailife 100 Smartbook

HP is keeping it cautious with the smartbook — they are launching the Compaq Airlife 100 in Europe this spring, as a subsidized deal with carrier Telefonica.  No word of a US launch yet.

The smartbook — in an obvious 10-inch netbook formfactor — is rumored to use Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor and chipset. There’s supposed to be a 16GB SSD and WiFi in there, along with the 3G connection.  HP also reckons the frugal smartbook will be chippy enough to last for 12 hours on a single charge.  Alternatively standby is tipped at 10 days. From the photos it’s obvious that there’s a webcam and an SD card slot, together with some useful shortcut keys around the trackpad; HP have also loaded up their own touchscreen UI.

If a USB slot is available,you probably would think of getting  a 320GB portable hard drive, just to attenuate the lack of storage space. If not, then say goodbye to accessory possibilities — no more external DVD burner. Info is pretty thin at the moment, but otherwise a pretty handy gadget.

First seen at SlashGear.com.

And so ends another edition of MacPCWiz’s Gadget Update. Ta ta!