Pioneer
DVR-A09XL: $100
www.pioneerusa.com

Differentiation is tough business in the optical drive market. It seems like everyone has a dual-layer burner with similar specs, available in white or black for a price just under $100. Pioneer's DVR-A09XL looks much the same, but it's just a little bit faster and from a name many customers associate with quality hardware. And if you're going to incorporate a dual-layer burner in a white box machine, spring for the better drive and avoid quality issues down the road.

The DVR-A09XL's specifications are pretty much standard. It'll write both formats of DVD-R and +R media at up to 16X in addition to dual-layer discs at 6X speeds. Standard CD-Rs are fair game, too, as are CD-RWs (40X and 24X respectively). The drive connects through a standard 40-pin IDE interface and employs a 2MB data buffer. And, of course, you can get it with either a black or white bezel.

Pioneer does claim to have a couple of unique features, such as its Liquid Crystal Control mechanism for optimizing recording quality, along with the Ultra Dynamic Resonance Absorber, designed to reduce vibration of imbalanced media. Regular support through firmware updates helps bolster Pioneer's case.

NEC
LCD3210 32” LCD: $2,699
www.necdisplay.com

Pay attention to the number of lcd displays you see in a typical day. They're everywhere: restaurants, boardrooms, living rooms, department stores, and in the theater. LCD technology is as visually attractive as it is flexible, and NEC's new LCD3210 maximizes in both regards to enable a display that sports superior tech specs and enough connectivity options for any conceivable environment.

To begin, the LCD3210 features a true 16:9 HD resolution of 1366 x 768, yielding the clearest possible on-screen text and images. Support for 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i display formats endears the display to businesses and home theater buffs alike. Further, NEC's XtraView technology extends viewing angles out to 176 degrees horizontally. Adjustable brightness allows your customer to balance between optimal visibility and power consumption. Black levels adjust themselves automatically to keep the picture quality crisp. And image ghosting is minimized through Rapid Response technology, NEC's marketing term for an impressive 18ms response time. Full motion video is consequentially distortion-free.

NEC also incorporates several features aimed at improving the LCD3210's signage functionality. For example, perhaps you've noticed bank ATM screens and airport flight information terminals with permanent burn-in from a persistent image. LCDs are not subject to the same damage, though they may endure a temporary residual picture. As a means to minimize the image persistence phenomena, NEC integrates a suite of panel-saving technologies, including a screen saver, a power-save function, and a side color function to adjust the black bars in 4:3 mode. An integrated real-time clock rounds out the package with operation scheduling.

Connectivity is perhaps the most compelling reason to spring for a 3210. The standard complement of inputs includes DVI, VGA, BNC, component, composite, and S-Video. An RS-232C port facilitates daisy-chaining—that is, displaying a single source on multiple monitors. Moreover, TileMatrix lets the 3210 function as part of up to a 4x4 video wall, resulting in a lower TCO since customers won't need to buy distribution amps or professional graphics cards in multi-unit applications.

NEC is gunning for the value-oriented public information display market with its LCD3210. Given the monitor's performance, connectivity, and price, it makes a great upsell opportunity for SMBs with emerging display needs.

PC Power and Cooling
Turbo-Cool 850 SSI: $469
www.pcpowercooling.com

When is a power supply worth almost $500? How about when it feeds a hungry dual-core processor, a pair of graphics cards running in SLI mode, and an array of hard drives? PC Power & Cooling's Turbo-Cool 850 SSI is designed for such grueling duties. You could even say its prowess is underrated, straight from the factory. Whereas most manufacturers advertise their hardware as it runs at unrealistically low temperatures, PC Power & Cooling cites real-world environments that take their toll on efficiency but yield realistic performance results.

Consequentially, a little education is in order when you pitch the Turbo-Cool 850 SSI or any of its smaller variants. Even though the 850 SSI delivers up to 850W of continuous power, it peaks at 950W in particularly intense situations and can recover from brownouts dipping as low as 80V AC. The efficiency and regulatory circuitry is such that PC Power & Cooling claims voltages 10 times more stable than the competition.

PC Power & Cooling endows the 850 SSI with an amazing level of connectivity, including a 24-pin motherboard connector, a 4-pin auxiliary plug, an 8-pin SSI connector, and a pair of 6-pin SLI graphics card plugs. You also get six SATA cables, eight large Molex connectors, and one mini floppy drive power cable.

Other manufacturers deliver power to critical +12V components, such as processors and graphics cards, over a single rail. The 850 SSI employs four rails +12V rails with 17A each. You can drive a pair of dual-core Opterons, two NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards, and a RAID 5 configuration without breaking a sweat. It may be overkill for an average desktop machine, but when you're talking about workstations that require EPS12V compliance, the Turbo-Cool 850 SSI just can't be beat.

CRU
Dataport 2-Bay Enclosure SATA Drive Carrier: $190
www.cru-dataport.com

NAS and SAN Network storage devices garner lots of attention because they're flexible, powerful, and extremely scalable. But when it comes to backup on a single computer—say, an isolated accounting machine—those storage technologies are overkill. DAS (Direct Attached Storage) products are generally less expensive and faster in many cases. The caveat is that they interface with a single computer, either through USB, Firewire, or SATA, and generally suffer reduced performance if you share resources over a network.

With that said, a DAS enclosure such as CRU's 2-Bay Enclosure with Dataport V is a great way to expand storage on a standalone machine. Since it uses a SATA 1.5 Gbps connection instead of USB or Firewire, transfers occur at full drive speed.

Removable drive carriers make it easy to swap out installed drives for archival. Any capacity is fair game, so long as it conforms to the SATA standard. You can even specify RAID 0 and 1 configurations (a four-drive version enables RAID 5 and 10 as well). The enclosure itself is all metal and built to withstand the life of an external peripheral. It has power and activity LEDs, just as you'd expect to see on the outside of a PC. In all, the Dataport is a solid buy for anyone looking to expand a data repository.

LSI Logic
SAS3442X SAS Host Bus Adapter: $367
www.lsilogic.com

So it turns out that serial ata 1.5 gbps didn't exactly make a staggering impact on the performance of desktop drive technology. Even as rotational speeds shift to 10,000 RPM, cache sizes hit 16MB, and throughput reaches 3 Gbps, we simply aren't taxing existing interfaces. Port multipliers, which allow you to connect more than one drive to a Serial ATA port, help make better use of today's higher bandwidth capacities, but there are still inherent disadvantages that keep SATA out of enterprise storage.

Up until now, SCSI and Fibre Channel have dominated usage models requiring 24x7 availability and extended MTBF. SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is poised to displace SCSI, though, simultaneously introducing a bevy of other flexibility benefits specific to medium-sized servers. According to Maxtor's Melissa Helms, the corresponding drives are already shipping and should be available within a month's time in capacities up to 300GB.

Of course, you'll need a host bus adapter to recognize and support SAS drives in a white box server build. LSI Logic's SAS3442X is one of the first available. Boasting eight ports with 3 Gbps each, the controller features Wide Bus support for up to 2.4 GBps of aggregate throughput. Pricing runs in line with what you might expect to pay for an older SCSI card. Hard drive compatibility ranges from 1.5 Gbps SATA to 3 Gbps SATA to 3 Gbps SAS. In other words, a customer that saves money with SATA storage today can upgrade to SAS down the road without having to replace an HBA. In fact, SATA and SAS can coexist on a server, delivering a balance between always-on reliability and near-line capacity at the best possible price point. Conversely, the card can address up to 252 SAS devices, enabling higher-end configurations, as well.