Loyd Case

About

Loyd Case came to computing by way of physical chemistry. He began modestly on a DEC PDP-11 by learning the intricacies of the TROFF text formatter while working on his master's thesis. After a brief, painful stint as an analytical chemist, he took over a laboratory network at Lockheed in the early 80's and never looked back. His first 'real' computer was an HP 1000 RTE-6/VM system.In 1988, he figured out that building his own PC was vastly more interesting than buying off-the-shelf systems ad he ditched his aging Compaq portable. The Sony 3.5-inch floppy drive from his first homebrew rig is still running today. Since then, he's done some programming, been a systems engineer for Hewlett-Packard, worked in technical marketing in the workstation biz, and even dabbled in 3-D modeling and Web design during the Web's early years.Loyd was also bitten by the writing bug at a very early age, and even has dim memories of reading his creative efforts to his third grade class. Later, he wrote for various user group magazines, culminating in a near-career ending incident at his employer when a humor-impaired senior manager took exception at one of his more flippant efforts. In 1994, Loyd took on the task of writing the first roundup of PC graphics cards for Computer Gaming World -- the first ever written specifically for computer gamers. A year later, Mike Weksler, then tech editor at Computer Gaming World, twisted his arm and forced him to start writing CGW's tech column.

An Array of Tiny Drives

Imagine a six-drive array of 80GB hard drives that fits entirely in a single 5.25-inch, 1/2 height drive bay. This is made possible by using 2.5-inch drives primarily targeted for laptop systems. We originally saw this JMR SATAStor at the Intel Developer Forum a year ago. Of course, you cant just drop a six-drive array […]

Linux Takes on Windows Gaming

The Dilemma As an operating system, Linux has many things to recommend it over Windows. Gaming, alas, is not one of them. Compared to Windows, Linux just doesnt have anywhere near the same level of good games. Yes, there are a few here and there, but overall, Windows continues to dominate as the PC gaming […]

The Evolving Memory Landscape

Robert Heinlein is famous for writing some of science fictions classic novels. We remember him today, however, for his famous acronym: TANSTAAFL (“There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.”) Heinlein was by no means the first writer to express that sentiment, but he used the acronym often enough that it stuck. TANSTAAFL is […]

High-Speed DVD Burner Roundup

Fast Burn When the first DVD burners came to market, they were exotic beasts costing hundreds of dollars. On top of the steep price tag, the battle waged between the Recordable DVD Council (which supports a DVD-R/-RW standard) and the DVD+RW Alliance (with its competing DVD+R/+RW standard) only served to stymie users further. While the […]

Up Close with the Latest Longhorn Build

At this years Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Microsoft released another sneak peek at its next generation operating system, code-named Longhorn. PC Magazine, along with the rest of the WinHEC attendees, received a DVD with the 4072 build. This preview is based on that build. The latest build is similar to the one released at […]

Hitachi 7K400 400GB Deskstar Hard Drive

Before we launch into the specs and features of the new Hitachi 400GB hard drive, we need to point out a few things. Hitachi is not targeting this hard drive for your normal PC desktop. Its really aimed at an emerging application category known as “near-line backup.” Another area of interest is media storage applications, […]

Olixir Mobile DataVault FastRestore SE

When disaster strikes, its important to get up and running as rapidly as possible. Unfortunately, tape backup is expensive and slow, so a few alternative solutions are emerging for small-business- and departmental-backup needs. One interesting solution is the Olixir Mobile DataVault FastRestore SE Backup and Disaster Recovery System, which uses a set of removable hard […]

Review: Western Digital WD740 Raptor

When we reviewed the original WD360 Raptor 10,000RPM hard drive a while back, we lamented its relatively small capacity. Just shy of 37GB, the original Raptor lacked the mega-capacity that todays desktop PC users crave. In fact, most 36GB drives found their way into SATA RAID configurations. The new WD740 doubles the capacity to 74GB. […]

Intel Developer Forum: Sessions Preview

The Intel Developer Forum conference coming to San Francisco on Tuesday is unlike many other industry events and shows. For one thing, it offers substantial “real meat,” in the form of specialized sessions that go deep into particular areas of technical interest. These sessions range from in-depth looks at new logicboard form factors to networking […]

Kaleidescape: Consumer Video Networking

Imagine an enterprise-class server. Such a system would typically have a fairly beefy server—but more importantly, would have robust, reliable storage. These servers typically have an array of hot-swappable hard drives, as well as technology to improve data integrity (parity drives, for example). A server like this would be ideal for delivering multiple video streams […]