Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Zotac has made quite a name for itself with its mini-PC products. The ZBOX offering aims at bringing an affordable Blu-Ray equipped HTPC option to the masses for some time now. Look no further than our review of the Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 to see what the fuss has been about."

This is an interesting box from Zotac which would quite easily fit in with your existing A/V equipment connected to the TV. It's quite a unique device which out of the box will play blu-ray discs, or even rip them to an external disk drive to allow you to store them on a server or NAS box, or it can also play these movies remotely acting as a streaming media center. There is also one other trick up it's sleeve that Anandtech mention and that is: 'Since the unit ships devoid of an OS you can even install Windows Home Server if you so choose'. I'm not sure what to make of that one! However, there does seem to be some limits to what it can do with the Intel Atom/ION GPU powering it which seems to let it down. That said, I like the form factor, I like the idea's behind it and it could make a good device for the bedroom, or the kids room.

"If you look at the SSD market today, you’d assume that it’s very different from what it was just six months ago when the X25-M launched. People are worried that the Intel drive has issues with degrading performance over time. Some vendors are now shipping “revised” JMicron drives with multiple controllers, supposedly fixing all of the problems I talked about last year."

AnandTech writes up an interesting article that takes a peek into the underlying issues of the whole SSD performance drop over time brouhaha and how newer generation SSDs are working to resolve it. The unfortunate reality is owing to the way in which SSDs work, the performance drop is a fact of life and cannot be avoided, though it can be mitigated to an extent. Even with several manufacturers working hard on the issue, Intel still remains top dog, commanding top prices, but the other brands do provide value, as long as you're willing to wait a few more seconds for that game/application/picture you wouldn't want your mom to see load.