Details

January 1998 / BYTE Hardware Lab Report / Details

Separated at Birth: Compaq's slot-load CD-ROM drive will remind you of something you'd find in a car stereo. It scores points for convenience. Compaq claims its trayless device has fewer m echanical malfunctions than typical CD-ROM drives that repeatedly open and close a tray loader.
No Sketchy Security Here: To deter theft, IBM provides physical laser etching of a 22-digit serial number on its DIMMs and CPU. Additionally, it stores a digital serial number on the EPROM. There's a security company (Retainagroup), with which businesses can register the serial numbers.
RAID Invades the PC: The HP Kayak XW workstation has FastRAID technology, which provides har d disk caching and RAID level 0 (disk striping). RAID is a technique for combining a number of disk drives to form a single storage system. The benefits include increased data security and higher levels of data throughput and I/O. Until now, this technology has been primarily available only on dedicated file servers. Based on Adaptec's RAID port Option (ARO) technology, it consists of a specially modified system board, PCI adapter card, and hard drives.

Separated at Birth
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No Sketchy Security Here
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RAID Invades the PC
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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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