Monday 20 October 2014

Synology DS115J

Synology DS115J

Synology's DiskStation DS214 was the dear winner in our last NAS Labs test, but the best things in life are never free, and the downside of this two-bay NAS was its sligntly high price. However, you can still join the Synolcgy NAS party without paying over the odds, as the company's new single-bay DS115J costs a more palatable £81 inc VAT.

As it only accommodates a single hard disk, RAID isn't even on the table. Although this means you might lose some performance, or the option of data mirroring, it makes the device much simplerto set up and use. You just plug in a drive turn it on, install the DiskStation Marager software and it's ready to go. There's no chance of waking up one day to find a drive dropped from the array, and there's none of the increased risk of mechanical failure of RAID 0 either.

MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming 4G

MSI GeForce GTX 970 Gaming 4G

Unlike the GTX 980, the GTX 970 is only available in custom SKUs courtesy of Nvidia's board partners. MSI is one such partner, and its GTX 970 Gaming 4G is a cracking card too.

The GTX 970 GPU is essentially the same as the GTX 980, but with three SMMs disabled, reducing its stream processor and texture unit counts to 1,664 and 104 respectively. The reference clock speed is also slightly down at 1,050MHz, but clock speeds also vary between partners. Elsewhere, the full 4GB cf GDDR5 memory again runs at 7GHz (effective) across the same 256-bit interface, and all 64 ROPs are intact too.