Synology DS210j

One of the questions I often get from friends coming up to Hong Kong is if stuff is cheaper here or in Singapore. In many cases, the answer is “not really” or “just a little” – but in the case of the Synology DS210j that I bought for my bro recently, it was a helluva lot cheaper!

At HK$1530 (which is about S$278 at 1S$:5.5HK$), you’d be paying almost 50% more if you bought one from Synology’s dealer in Singapore (Memory World) which has priced it at S$408. Plus according to the Synology forum (post dates back to 2007 though), Synology does provide international warranty.

So why the DS210j? Only the Qnap TS210J II comes close to the DS210j’s transfer rates, but is more expensive. The rest of the 2-bay NAS competition, like the D-Link DNS-323 are generally slower. Oh, and its DLNA compliant too, so fits in with the plan of adding those ‘media extender’ devices to stream video and audio later.

Seagate was given a bloody brusing at the hands of the dismal economy last year. In Q1 2009, the HDD (hard disk drive) market took a steep nosedive and plunged almost 35 per cent.

It sent the industry into shock, and Seagate was badly affected. Not surprising, since most of the hard disks in the world are made by a few players like Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samasung and Toshiba, of which the first two have the lion’s share.

“Imagine 40 million units wiped out in one quarter,” said Banseng (BS) Teh, sales/marketing VP and managing director of APAC, Seagate at their media update today. “It was the most disasterous quarter for disk drives ever.”

According to him, even during the previous tech recession in 2001 the 31-year old company never saw negative growth — at worst it was almost flat — but the market never shrunk, like it did last year, -1.4 per cent globally in 2009.

Hard disk maker Seagate said today that it was closing its Singapore factory and cutting 2,000 jobs in the process, even as the United States appears to be coming out of one of the worst economic slums in decades.

Seagate’s plant at Ang Mo Kio will be closed by the end of next year, as it moves its manufacturing operations to low-cost countries in the region, including China, Thailand and Malaysia, to cut costs amounting to US$40 million a year.

The hard disk maker will keep its Asia headquarters in Singapore, as well as its media operations and an R&D centre in the Republic, according to wire reports.

However, the news of its plant closure will mark yet another sobering chapter for Singapore’s once-stellar electronics manufacturing sector.

I’ll be honest and say that I was a little skeptical about Seagate’s FreeAgent Theater when the test unit was recently sent for a Goondu check-out.

Why, in a time when people are streaming videos at home with an Xbox or Playstation 3, or playing back DivX movies on compatible DVD players, would they turn to another media player, this time from a hard disk manufacturer?

Well, I got my answer when I finally fired up my first two movies – The Spartans and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle – on my LCD TV in the living room.

Finally, after the entire world seems to have moved on from buying external hard disk enclosures and slotting in your own hard disks, along comes Lian Li, the venerable aluminum PC case maker, with what are two of the most “chio” enclosures out there.

Spotted on US online shop Performance PCs, the EX-20 is a two-bay enclosure that supports eSATA as well as USB 2.0, while the EX-30 is a three-bay device. Both use a Silicon Image chip to handle the transfer between the hard disk’s SATA interface and the external eSATA and USB interfaces.

The hard drives can be hot-swapped by simply sliding them out after unlocking the well-ventilated front panel. The hard disk connectors, as seen in pictures online, appear to be the same used in Lian Li’s new cases, which means a smooth fit.

If you haven’t checked out Alfred’s post on the first day, do so!

I was a man on a mission at this PC Show as I was looking to replace my old cranky desktop, which had parts of it dying and failing on me over a period of six months. An old hard disk was the first to go (trashed), followed by a stuttering video card (repaired) and now the DVD drive has totally gone kaput. Can’t blame the old dear; the machine is a cobbled monstrosity of some very old parts mixed in with new ones that has lived quite a rich and long enough life.

So at the show I was looking mostly at desktops and netbooks (tempted to get one even though my old laptop is still perfectly fine — a typical geek itch), when I came across very cool touchscreen PCs at both the HP and Dell booths. I’ve been to the last three IT fairs, and this is a new product I haven’t seen at a fair before.

HP TouchSmart

My little FreeNAS box

Let me kickstart a new series here on Techgoondu – Goondu DIY, which gives a look at what goondus like us get our hands dirty with. By the way, it’s also disguised as a guide, so if you want to get your hands dirty, keep following these pages!

First off, I’m going to share my experience with FreeNAS, the freeBSD-based, open-source NAS software for turning your old PC or new, low-powered Atom-based PC into a NAS (networked attached storage). Since NAS is all the rage now, why not build your own, right?

Well, actually, it’s not for everyone. If you want storage, then a D-Link DNS-323 or QNap TS209 II, both of which I’ve tried and used, is a better bet. But what if you want to download fast over Bittorrent while sharing your files with your friends online and also to serve the media to your PS3 or XBox in the living room?

Then you need a proper server! This not only offers NAS functions, but also provides much faster BT downloads than the pitifully slow BT clients on regular NAS boxes.

Popular with many DIYers online, FreeNAS is the free software you might want to install onto your server to offer features that are essentially as good as regular NAS boxes. Why FreeNAS? 1) It’s free 2) It’s powerful 3) It’s relatively easy to run 4) It has low hardware requirements. Here’s my experience with FreeNAS…

Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500GB

I had not gone to Sim Lim Square or Funan Centre (now called Digitalife Mall or something) for two months, and I think that’s a record. The reason: I had overspent at the turn of the year on my crazy watercooling PC, and I was determined to stay away from temptation.

Yesterday, however, presented a chance to check out the latest gizmos again, since I had “sacrificed” my 2.5-inch 250GB portable hard disk to replace the faulty one in my wife’s Compaq laptop (that’s another story, trust me).

So, down I went to Funan to look for a replacement to put into my Silverstone TS01 hard disk enclosure. Man, are prices for 2.5-inch portable drives falling fast.

Do check out Part I if you haven’t done so!

At every computer show I always check out memory card prices just to see how much they have fallen. Here’s what I spotted at the Kingston booth at Hall 6.

Kingston booth at Hall 6

For a comparison, look at some of the memory card prices from last November’s Sitex.

Prices of memory cards, especially the 8GB and 16GB varieties, have fallen. The 8GB micro SD has dropped from around $32 to $25 and the 16GB micro SD from $112 to $84.

Do check out Part I, Part II and Part III of Techgoondu’s coverage at Sitex ‘08 if you haven’t, where Alf did a bang-up job covering most of the stuff. Here’s my additional two cents:

Sitex isn’t a show just for electronic gadgets it seems. I saw cars, handbags, exercise equipment, and even one booth selling spa treatments(!).

The Awesome Threesome at Sitex