In Depth: 12 best solid state drives
To find out, we've gathered 12 of the best solid state drives known to man. More importantly, our so-solid dozen includes examples of every one of the key SSD drive controllers currently on the market.
But first, a bit of history. SSD flash drives were supposed to be the final piece of the solid state puzzle. The last significant component to make the shift from moving parts to solid silicon. We could kiss goodbye to silly spinning platters and say hello to the kind of storage performance that was on a par with the rest of the PC platform.
Unfortunately, it didn't happen that way. The early days of solid state drives were a sad story of suckage. When the first vaguely affordable drives rocked up a couple of years ago, they seemed slick enough out of the box – but they had problems in the way they read and wrote data.
It was a bit of a downer, especially as they cost the earth. Since then, things have gradually improved. Thanks to new technologies, such as the TRIM command in Windows 7, the long-term performance of most drives is definitely on the up.
What's more, capacities have been growing and prices falling. All of which begs the obvious question: are SSDs now fit for mainstream consumption?
Make no mistake, it's the controller chipset more than any other component in an SSD that defines its performance and longevity. In that context, the identity of the drive manufacturer is less critical.
As you'd expect, we have established controller favourites from the likes of Intel, Samsung and Indilinx. We also take our first look at the much-hyped Sandforce SF-1200 controller, a chip that promises massive sequential performance, speedy random access and long legs. But can it really deliver on all three counts?
And that's not all. Courtesy of Crucial's C300 drive, we can add a new Marvell chip to the mix. Not all that much is known about Marvell's latest in terms of detailed specifications. However, in a way, the number of channels, the cache quantities and all that jazz don't matter. What does count is how well the thing actually performs. Roll on the benchmarks…
1. Kingston SSDNow V Series 30GB
Judging the performance and reliability of SSDs is tricky at the best of times. However, if you want even more punishment, may we suggest you add RAID to the mix? It adds yet another layer of complexity.
For the record, and despite a recent Intel motherboard update, our best information is that the TRIM command is not supported for SSDs in RAID arrays. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Read the full Kingston SSDNow V Series review
2. OCZ Onyx 32GB
When it comes to affordable SSDs, the latest fashion is towards the tiny. In that context, OCZ's new Onyx 32GB drive is as trendy as they come. But is it so small that you'd have to be a style victim to buy it?
Very probably, yes. Fully formatted, you're left with 29.7GB of storage. That sounds like a reasonable result for a 32GB drive. At least, it does until you observe how much remains after a full install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.
Read the full OCZ Onyx 32GB review
3. Intel X25-V 40GB
Fancy Intel's second generation SSD tech at a third the price of its flagship 160GB? Yes please. After all, Intel's current controller chipset technology is one of the few proven to maintain decent performance over time.
In fact, our test X25-V drive has been knocking about PCF towers for some time. But, courtesy of support for the Windows 7 TRIM command, not to mention a quick buff-and-format treatment prior to testing, it's not far off box-fresh performance.
Read the full Intel X25-V 40GB review
4. Corsair Nova V64 64GB
What are your minimum requirements for an SSD? We know what ours are. First, we'd like a controller chipset that not only delivers good performance but keeps doing so for longer than a few weeks.
Next, we want enough space for our operating system of choice and our favourite apps. We definitely don't want to shunt application installs onto a secondary drive.
Finally, we'd rather not flog Granny to the glue factory to pay for it. At first glance, Corsair's latest budget-orientated drive nails the lot.
Read the full Corsair Nova review
5. Kingston SSDNow V+ SERIES 128GB
As Admiral Adama once said to Colonel Tigh, context matters. Shortly after that, the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series lost the plot. But the great pockmarked one did have a point. Taken out of context, £230 is a lot for any individual item of PC kit.
But for a 128GB SSD, it's cheap. It's important to get your expectations calibrated before you consider this one. If you want a drive of this size and the best in solid state performance, you'll need to pay a bit more.
Read the full Kingston SSDNow V+ review
6. Corsair P128 128GB
With the snazzy new Force F100 drive and its zippy Sandforce controller slotting in as Corsair's new performance SSD in the 100GB-ish segment, is the end nigh for the 128GB P128?
Probably – but until it disappears, the P128 has plenty to offer. For starters, it's conspicuously better value than its in-house cousin and not simply in terms of capacity.
Read the full Corsair P128 review
7. Patriot Torqx 128GB
For the history of the SSD condensed into a single drive, look no further than Patriot's Torqx 128GB. It's been around for the better part of a year and, like the broader SSD category, it's been a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs.
At launch, we had high hopes for the Torqx thanks to its Indilinx Barefoot controller. Various claims were made regarding the power of the Barefoot's ARMbased CPU.
Read the full Patriot Torqx review
8. Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB
Along with the two Sandforce-based drives from OCZ and Corsair, Crucial's latest falls into what we'd call the fourth generation SSD category. Benefiting from all the lessons learned during the dodgy early days of SSD engineering, it's literally the latest technology.
The fact that Crucial still managed to cock things up early on with the RealSSD C300 just goes to show how difficult it is to knock up a decent solid state drive.
Read the full Crucial RealSSD review
9. Corsair Force F100 100GB
At any moment in the history of the solid state drives, there's always been an "it" SSD controller chipset – a controller that turns heads and generally dominates the news.
First came the JMicron, famous for all the wrong reasons, then Intel shook the industry with a new controller majoring on maximum I/O ops and random performance. Indilinx followed with the Barefoot controller that was competitive on both price and performance.
Read the full Corsair Force F100 review
10. OCZ Vertex 2 100GB
Does OCZ's Vertex 2 smell familiar? It should do. After all, it boasts the same 100GB capacity as the Corsair Force F100. More importantly, it's the second SSD in our group to pack the impressive new Sandforce SF-1200 controller chipset. But which is better?
As Harry Hill would say, there's only one way to find out. Fight! Actually, you need only make a price comparison and then conclude in favour of the Corsair. Right? Not so fast.
Read the full OCZ Vertex 2 review
11. Intel X25-M G2 160GB
When Intel decides to take on a technological challenge, it doesn't arse about. Nope, it crushes the problem with military force. However, with Intel's might also comes a lumbering clumsiness.
On occasion, you can see the massive bureaucracy struggle to change direction in response to events. So it was with Intel's early SSDs, which suffered from rapidly degrading performance.
Read the full Intel X25-M review
12. Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 128GB
Disruptive new technologies tend to make established players look flat-footed. So it was that a small Californian company called Tesla beat mighty and historic brands including Porsche and Ferrari to market with the first pukka electric sports car.
It's the same story when it comes to SSDs. A dozen drives from seven manufacturers make up our Supertest this month, but only the SiliconEdge Blue comes from a traditional hard drive maker, namely Western Digital.
Read the full Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue review
Testing SSDs is probably the toughest job in tech journalism today. That's partly because although SSDs are solid, they're not completely static. Their performance can and does vary with use.
More than other components, the gap between synthetic test results and real-world performance can also be enormous when it comes to these drives. For those reasons, we recommend care when drawing firm conclusions from the results published here.
That's not to say the numbers below don't provide a useful insight into what you'll get for your money, rather that focusing on a figure – such as 4k random performance – could put you off what's actually a very effective SSD. So, with all that in mind, here are the numbers.
Indexing the benches
Judging SSD performance is a tricky business, as it's not just all about the individual results for particular tests, but the overall picture. So we created a pair of indexes to help sort the dream drives from the not-so-solid duds.
The bang-for-buck index combines a drive's performance in our application installation test with its cost. Of course, capacity also counts, so we've also added the storage size of each drive to the bang-for-buck index to create an overall metric of performance, value and capacity.
And the winner is...
First the bad news. SSDs are still too expensive. For that reason, the biggest drive on test clocks in at 160GB. Drives in the 200GB and up category remain irrelevant. We haven't bothered to include them because they cost stupid money. It's that simple.
That single, but significant, caveat aside, we're feeling more upbeat about solid state storage than ever. Unlike previous SSD groupies, not one of this month's models exhibited any noticeable lag or stutter. With the possible exception of some of the smaller drives, therefore, they'd all make a great upgrade over that antediluvian magnetic platter humming away inside your PC.
On a similar general note, the subjective experience these drives deliver doesn't square precisely with the benchmark results. That's true both in comparison to each other and with our standard hard drive. What the benchies don't capture is the responsiveness and agility of the SSDs.
You're never left waiting for a platter to spin up or the read head to change tack. Also, don't forget that the sort of instant and catastrophic failure that occasionally bricks a conventional hard drive is almost unheard of in SSD circles.
It's time, then, for the prizes. In the 30GB to 40GB range, we'll give Intel the nod. Not only does the X25-V have a significant advantage in terms of 4k random performance, but the extra seven or eight GB of capacity could make the difference between having just enough space and the tedium of constantly shunting software on and off the drive.
Further up the scale, the competition is extremely close. The next drive to grab our attention is OCZ's Nova V64. It's double the price of the smallest drives, but then it's also twice as large and therefore much more realistic as an all-purpose boot drive. The Nova is pretty quick, too, thanks to an Indilinx controller.
As for the final honours, it's an incredibly tight contest. You can make a strong case for nearly all the 100GB-plus models tested. The two drives with the new Sandforce controller are certainly screamers, but first prize goes to Kingston's less exotic SSDNow V+ Series.
Significantly cheaper than the competition, the V+ comes close enough in our real world app tests that we doubt you'd actually feel the benefit of a more expensive drive. It's the end-user experience, not numbers in a benchmark spreadsheet, that counts.
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In Depth: Green PC or powerful gaming? How to get both
The world of gaming systems is driven by the expressions of power. It's all swirling graphics and butch names, usually from Greek mythology. All a little adolescent really. Now, however, being green is becoming sexy in an odd sort of way. It shows you care and can get you chicks (tongue + cheek).
Of course, big business has always been interested in low-power consumption; mainly because it saves money. Now the target of economy has been repackaged and resold as green to the rest of us, with all the moral overtones that entails.
It's no longer a dull business machine; it's a shiny green eco-model with logos to prove it. Sorry if this sounds cynical, it's our job to be. Whether you are a full-blown believer in the impending doom or not, there is an awful lot of being 'green' which doesn't wash well.
That games system you covet, replete with monster GPU, power supply and over-specified everything else with pleasing LED glowy bits, has started to look a little irresponsible - similar to huge 4x4s, flying to Switzerland for the weekend, heated swimming pools and all the other things that used to be merely decadent, not morally reprehensible. Can we have our cake and eat though?
Obviously we are not going to stop playing games, that's just crazy talk.
Power consumption of all
How much power does your PC use? And don't think the number on the PSU has anything to do with it, that's just the absolute maximum the power supply can manage reliably.
Armed with a plug-in energy monitor (about a tenner from Maplins) we took two systems from opposite ends of the power curve and had a look.
First, we tried an unassuming Dell business machine running a Celeron, which had Intel integrated graphics. During boot it peaked at 109W then settled down to 67W at the Windows desktop. We gave it a few meaty tasks, but couldn't get it to use more than 120W, thrashing the hard drive had the biggest effect. Meanwhile, setting the machine into standby mode it consumes only 3W.
Next, we tried something tasty running on a high-end motherboard. We know it is high-end because it has pointless lights and flashy fins all over it. Graphics came thanks to a ludicrously large and hot Radeon 5970. Booting peaked at 250W and even doing nothing much in particular at the desktop it consumed a healthy 170W.
Start running a DirectX 11 benchmark and it jumps to 200W as the 2.0TB hard drive spins up. When the 3D really started to do its stuff, it topped out at over 350W. This is a big beast of a rig, and even on standby it managed to be greedy at 9W.
These don't compare terribly well with the new generation of Green PCs especially developed and sold with their green credentials to the fore. A typical example consumes about 30W at the desktop. The question is: can we modify our gaming system to be both capable and green?
What can I save?
Some quick calculation on watts and prices reveal that saving money – and money is power – isn't going to be easy. The trouble is that electricity is just so cheap relatively speaking. Just twelve pennies will run an average PC for about ten hours.
The only reason you might grumble at your electricity bill is that we've all been seduced into buying loads and loads of electrical items and then using them all the time, like the wasteful beasts we are, instead of being content with candles and mangles.
How much can you actually save by cutting your PC's power consumption? Taking peak rate at 12p and running your PC for an average of five hours a day, every day for a year, and having shaved 10W off its power consumption, saves… wait for it: £2.20. Which sounds, er, spectacularly mediocre. Still, it's a start. And if everybody did it, it would be a goodly thing to do.
Running though the options for the major components we start with…
Processor
Chips can be pretty power hungry at full blast. If you look at your processor specifications you'll find the TDP, Thermal Design Power, which is quoted in watts. For desktop chips this runs from about 45 to 140W.
This isn't the power consumption though, it's the maximum heat dispersion required, and it is an absolute maximum too, it's useful only as a rough guide. Actual power consumption can be tricky to ascertain, as it is dependent on what your system is doing.
Modern processors are pretty good at throttling back and switching off cores, so picking a high performance one won't necessarily mean a such a huge increase in overall power consumption. Bare in mind that when idling CPUs can drop to as little as 10W. The more energy efficient chips tend to be the more mature designs running on a smaller process.
Many older designs now appear in low voltage flavours. Intel has a 1GHz Pentium M which has a TDP of just 7W. Nice, but it's not quite got the oomph we'll want.
AMD's top Phenoms come in at 140W TDP, but drop to 125 or even 95W fairly quickly. Even relatively new chips such as the Deneb core Phenom II have low power 'e' versions. The Phenom II X4 910e offers 2.6GHz four core fun at 65W.
Top choices from Intel include the Clarksfield-based i3s which run at 73W. Basically if you want power you pays the watts.
Since the point of this piece is keeping the power while trying to be green there is no point suggesting you cripple such an important component. That said, if the choice is between two chips at the cusp of the TDP categories, well lower might not hurt.
As for cooling: a typical fan might consume six watts or so and be able to idle at less, not much really. Going passive will save you that, of course, and all those copper pipes and aluminium fins look dead cool [Could you sound any older? – Ed].
But this on it's own isn't going to save you that much, and passive cooling can introduce all kinds of problems.
Memory
PC memory uses about 8W a stick for 1.8V. The simple way to reduce power is to reduce the voltage, which has been dropping steadily anyway. DDR started out at 2.5V, DDR2 at 1.8V and DDR3 at 1.5V. DDR4, due anytime 2012ish, should start out at running at 1.2V. Fitting fewer larger sticks doesn't hurt either as long as you keep your channels populated.
In the meantime we have low voltage DDR3 modules appearing which can run at as low as 1.25V. These are a trifle expensive though and quite frankly unless you are running some sort of server farm aren't worth the special investment. When the low voltage sticks become readily affordable then it is an obvious way to shave off some watts.
If you've been toying with the idea of fitting more memory though then go for it, as this will stop Windows hitting the swap file as much and spinning up the hard drive. Talking of which, we move onto…
Hard drive
Power and consumption here is pretty much directly linked to the spin speed, access time and the capacity. A typical drive burns between 10 to 15W at full chat and half that at idle. Obviously two drives means more power, so always go for one big drive.
There are a few clever things the manufacturers can do here, and are beginning to. Hitachi has a new energy efficient Deskstar range, which still runs at 7,200rpm but manages under 5W at idle and an impressive 7W or so at full bore. The price paid is sluggish access times, over 18ms, and like going back to 90s.
Western Digital has released what it terms its 'GreenPower' series, which runs at a more leisurely 5,200rpm and boasts a reduction of four or five watts. A saving, but again performance takes a hit.
What is clear from these greener drives is that you don't get owt for nowt. There is just not enough wriggle room to make significant saving without reducing performance.
How about solid state drives then? No motor to spin here. We were expecting some savings, and were disappointed.
Using our high-end test system we swapped out the 2.0TB traditional drive and fitted a 40GB SSD. Power consumption at the desktop dropped from 170W to 162W, putting a heavy load on the drive it managed a tad over 185W against around 200W. A saving, but nothing spectacular.
In fact one of the major disappointments of SSDs, particularly for laptops, is the minimal power savings, when compared to 2.5-inch laptop drive there's not much in it. The trouble is when SSDs are active they always draw their maximum power, unlike traditional drives, which only use maximum power when moving rapidly.
It's a developing technology though, and power saving modes have yet to be sorted out. Perhaps somebody could have a word with Microsoft about the way Windows seemingly insists on hammering the drive at every opportunity. But now for the real culprit…
Graphics card
Any 3D card that requires its own connection to your PC's power supply has to be up to something. If it has multiple GPUs, lots of RAM and is widely lauded as desirable then it's also a power hungry beast.
Among the real bad boys here are the GeForce GTX 480 and the Radeon HD 5970. The former can touch 200W and the latter over 250W when pushing lots of pixels, which is likely to be more than the rest of your whole PC.
Further down the scale things get more reasonable, just about. Even fairly humble cards, such as the GeForce 7900 GT or Radeon X1800 GTO draw 60W in full 3D fly, and still need about half that when you are sitting about at the desktop in plain old 2D.
If gaming is part of your thing then is it worth downgrading your 3D card for the sake of power consumption? Of course not, are you mad? If you are putting together a system that isn't going to run 3D to the max then here is where you can save heaps of watts.
If you are changing cards anyway, then it is worth doing a little digging to see what can give you the performance you need at a reasonable rate, single GPU cards for a start. Whilst the green credentials for many components are easy to find, graphics cards tend to be quiet about this side of things, understandably perhaps.
Power supply
Finally, we have a component where it might actually be worth upgrading simply to reduce your power consumption. A typical non-branded PSU is only about 75 to 80 per cent efficient – ouch. Older ones can be even worse.
If your PC is burning 200W then a 75 per cent efficient PSU is actually drawing 250W and using 50W of that to heat your room. Switch to an 85 per cent efficient model and you've saved a commendable 15W, without any compromise in performance. That's the beauty of this saving, it makes no difference to anything other than the power used.
The wattage quoted on PC power supplies is a maximum, what it actually puts out depends on what your PC requires, so there's no point in worrying about having a high rating if it isn't needed. In fact running a much more powerful PSU means running it at well below its capacity, which is often less efficient than running a smaller PSU at a higher load.
You also need a factor in this efficiency when picking a suitable wattage too. A 500W supply at 80 per cent efficiency can only supply 400W for your system. Somewhere on your PSU you'll find a little label which tells you the amperage available at 12V, multiply this out to get an idea of the output available.
Help is at hand here, an initiative called 80 PLUS comprehensively tests power supplies for efficiency. Anything managing over 80 per cent earns a bronze standard, go better and it's a silver, gold or even platinum award where efficiencies are a minimum of 90 per cent across the load ranges tested.
A comprehensive list of tested PSUs is on the www.80plus.org website and it is well worth checking any potential purchase here (Enermax looks to be particularly good and EarthWatts good value).
Will you get your money back though if you swap when you're existing PSU isn't kaput yet? Maybe if you make heavy use of your PC, switching could save 20W or so then at a usage of ten hours a day or more and you'll get back your £50 in five to six years. Woo.
That covers your major components. There are other draws on power. Optical drives are much of a muchness and it's only a few watts anyway even when there are at full spin. Switching back to wired networks saves a few more watts. Using motherboards with laptop chipsets saves you more, but at a considerable cost.
Are we green yet?
Well sort of. As the figures show buying new kit to try and reduce the power consumption is mostly a waste of time. Even when hammering your PC all day every day, getting your money back before your PC is retired from active service is next to impossible.
The only really big savings you can make easily are to take out your 3D card (no thank you) and maybe getting a super-efficient power supply. With some research and careful choices, you can build a PC that is cheaper to run without being too dull.
You can start by simply not over specifying. If it doesn't need too fancy a graphics card or such a capacious hard drive. Don't just pick ultra low power components either, many of these come at quite a premium, you may be better off with cheaper standard models. It's performance per watt we want, not just the lowest possible wattage.
In moderation
The specifications of the typical PC marketed under the green banner are a good guide, as these tend towards the same idea – moderate power CPU, no specialist 3D card, passive cooling, not too much RAM and a low speed, smaller hard drive. This is hardly the blueprint for a modern games machine though; a decent media player at best.
Hardcore greens, and if you consider yourself one then you've obviously found this magazine in somebody else's recycling bin, might well scoff at what we have covered here. The solution is simple, turn your PC off, apart from the hours you spend posting self-satisfied messages on forums about how much you've lowered your 'carbon footprint' of course (now we're scoffing, sorry).
It's not all about saving money you say, that's just a peripheral consideration, lowering the wattage is all. This reduces the load on power stations and means we burn less fuel. A valid point, but once something has been made, needlessly replacing it usually doesn't help in the long run.
The off switch is the first and best way to save power. Don't forget to make sure you get rid of any PC kit responsibly too, preferably passing it on to make the most of it.
Gartner (respected IT research and advisory firm) reckon that 70 per cent of the natural resources consumed by a PC over its life is used during its manufacture. A constant cycle of upgrading it not good news environmentally.
The message then is buy responsibly and keep kit in use. You really want to go proper green? Don't buy a PC or peripheral, there are loads lurking under people's beds and at the back of cupboards. Never upgrade and learn to love integrated graphics. Then switch it on only in case of emergencies, and give yourself a hard time about it afterwards. Are we having fun yet?
The trouble here is, well, you can't do all the wonderful stuff a really buzzing PC can do, not least of all the 3D wonderment that is modern gaming, if you go all out for 'greenness', which can be, like anything that is uncompromising – a right pain. Perhaps the simplest, and certainly the cheapest way, to help save the planet, is to change behaviour first.
Using a little thought and effort you can reduce your power consumption without compromising all the chocolatey goodness. What you can't do is simply go shopping for new components and think that'll be enough to be 'green'. You'll pay out more than you'll ever recover, cause yet more kit to be manufactured and lower performance. Do you want to merely look green, or actually be green?
Enjoy a decent games system and turn the thing off when you leave the room (or at the least switch to standby). Remember your parents telling you to turn off the lights? They were not only being annoying, they had a point.
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Review: Prosoft Drive Genius 3
You won't need Prosoft Drive Genius 3 in the normal course of events. Minor file system mishaps will be catered for by Apple's automatic clean-up scripts. After that, Apple's standard Disk Utility will have a decent stab at file system repairs and will effect a repair in the majority of cases, but it can't cope with severe file system or partition problems.
At this point you may wish that you already owned a copy of Drive Genius 3, which offers all the drive repair tools you could hope for. If you've already got a copy of Drive Genius 2 then you may wish to skip the rest of this review; version three offers some nice new features but most existing users will find none of them a must-have.
Drive troubles slain
This latest version has an impressive array of features, including those you would expect (and may already have in an older product) such as: file system repair, hard drive information reports, defrag, data shredding, rapid benchmarking and Drive Slim, which looks to free up wasted space.
A new feature is an improved drive integrity check that can scan for bad blocks. Hard drive trouble comes in two flavours: file system issues and hardware failures. An experienced ear can tell the difference simply by listening to the drive trying to read data.
A hardware failure isn't necessarily game over though, as all drives have 'spare sectors' that their firmware uses to 'reallocate' a failing sector and prolong the life of the drive. In English, this means that tiny bits of worn-out hard drive are ignored and new spare space is used instead.
New to version 3, Drive Genius will scan your drive (and surprisingly quickly – see the screenshot below, right) for worn-out sectors and trigger the remapping feature, which can resurrect a failing drive – at least long enough for you to get your data off of it (and if anything, experience has taught us that failing drives should be retired sooner rather than later).
Also new is Drive Pulse – a menubar item that visibly reports your drive's health (note this only applies to internal drives since external drives can't report their health over USB or FireWire), an enhanced defragmentation algorithm, native 64-bit installation (10.6 or later only), and email notification of task completion.
Also new and more impressive is the ability to resize, hide, duplicate, delete and add partitions, including the boot volume (if you start from the supplied DVD), and RAID support in the form of both Apple's hardware and software array solutions, making this a wise purchase for a Mac Pro owner with lots of internal drives.
That said, the latter features will be of most use to an IT professional and there is a Pro licenced version available for $250 (about £164), which is aimed at IT service shops. The whizzy animated interface is inventive, but won't be to everyone's taste, hence it can be stilled via a preference tickbox.
Recovery lacking Conspicuously absent from Drive Genius is any sort of data recovery feature. For this you'll need to purchase Prosoft's sister product, Data Rescue 3 (which, incidentally, is most excellent).
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Review: Anime Studio Debut 7
When we looked at version 6 of Anime Studio Debut back in August 2009, we concluded it packed a heck of a punch for such a value-driven application.Not only was it relatively straightforward to use, but its excellent stock library, output options and first-rate tutorials and start files had us up and animating in minutes. The lone criticism we angled at it was that its interface was about as aesthetically pleasing as a bag of spanners.
So let's get the bad news out the way first: it's still ugly. Not just dull, grey and uninspiring. Straight ugly. Its fonts haven't been spruced in the slightest, the grey panels and palettes remain wholly unprofessional, and the interface in general sticks out from OS X's sleek surroundings like a sore thumb.
Fun is the word
The good news, however, is that it's still an utter joy to use. The drawing options remain unchanged, and it offers a quick and direct means of sketching out characters and elements.
New custom brushes are a nice touch, but hardly revolutionise this process. And a Beginners Mode enables you to quickly toggle between simple tool-tip driven dialogs and the full toolbox. What does make a difference to the creation process, however, is the introduction of the new masking function.
Anyone familiar with a basic image-editor will know what a chore masking image elements can be, and while the new Image Masking tool isn't on a par with Photoshop's, for instance, it can yield quick and usable results whenever the need arises. We found it worked best when applied to portraits, producing clever cut-outs with preset feathering to ease any harsh edges left.
Also welcome are the multiple improvements SmithMicro has made to the animating process. Here is where Debut can be more favourably compared to its professionally orientated spin-off, Anime Studio Pro 7.
The Follow Path tool works like Flash's motion tweens. Simply pick an object on the stage, create a path, and the object will follow that path. You can set individual speeds for each path, and even experiment with a degree of bend along the path, just like Flash.
The results are impressive, too, and had us quickly bouncing our character's hands in a clapping motion with just a few simple path selections. It's improvements like these that make up for the ugly interface.
The Bones tool, Switch Layers function and Animate Points haven't had any obvious upgrades, but all merit mention purely for their continued ease of use.
Elsewhere the Content Library has received something of a spruce up, though as in keeping with the rest of the interface, there's nothing to get excited about visually. You may now save your own character creations and objects directly to the library, and the new stock elements are – like version 6 – excellent.
Fully rigged
As well as standard scenery, paths and characters, there are even more fully rigged characters to begin playing around with, as well as some excellent, thorough tutorials and start files, and a new Gather Media Function ensures no audio or image files go missing from your project folder.
New outputting options have also been added, including 780p and 1080p, as well as AVI, MOV and SWF.
Anime Studio 7 might look like a dog's dinner from afar, but get in close, poke around and its hidden gems rapidly rise to the surface.
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In Depth: How motherboards are made: a miracle of modern electronics
Perhaps you've fallen into the trap of thinking that a motherboard is just a slab of fibreglass for the all important processor to slot into. Well, it's time to rethink things: the motherboard is the nervous system of your PC. It provides the essential communication pathways that enable the rest of your machine to do its job, handles the video circuitry and connections to external devices and even resists scrabbling hands trying to rip out graphics cards or rubbing all those essential components. Like all true workhorses, when it does its job, you barely notice it.
Manufacturing them remains a challenge. True, processors have features that are so small that they can't be seen with the naked eye, but the amount of technology at work when building a motherboard is no less impressive.
It's an intensive process – and one that you're about to learn in detail.
1. Raw materials
Like any other electronic item, tracing the motherboard back to its roots leaves us staring at a hole in the ground – or, to be more accurate, a couple of them.
The two dominant constituents of a printed circuit board are fibreglass – which provides insulation – and copper, which forms the conductive pathways, taking us back to their birthplaces in a sand quarry and open-cast copper mine respectively.
Turning sand into glass and copper ore into metal are processes that are hundreds of years old, but what we do with the materials next is anything but ancient.
2. Fabricating copper-clad laminate
Molten glass is extruded to produce glass fibres that are woven to create a sheet of fibreglass fabric. Next the sheet is impregnated with epoxy resin and heated to partially cure the resin; the resulting sheet is called 'prepreg'. Multiple sheets of prepreg are stacked to produce a laminated sheet of the required thickness.
Sheets of copper foil are applied to both sides of the laminate and the sandwich is placed in a heated press. This completes the curing of the resin, making the laminate rigid and causing the layers to bond together.
The result is an insulating sheet of fibreglass with copper foil on both sides: copper-clad laminate. The overall thickness of the printed circuit board (PCB) is typically 1.6mm. This means that, for a six-layer board, the fibreglass laminates will be about 0.35mm thick and the copper foil will be about 0.035mm thick.
The fibreglass is thick enough to provide adequate mechanical strength and rigidity, and the copper is sufficient for good electrical and thermal conductivity.
3. Etching away unwanted copper
A photosensitive material called photo-resist is applied to both sides of the copper-clad laminate, totally covering the copper layers. This is usually a dry film process, in which thin films of solid photo-resist are laminated onto both sides of the board using equipment that's fairly similar to an office laminator.
Now a transparent artwork showing the pattern of the PCB's pads and tracks is placed over the photosensitive copper-clad laminate, and is then exposed to ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet is used rather than visible light so the board can be handled safely in daylight.
Where the photo-resist is exposed to ultraviolet, the chemicals polymerise, forming a plastic. Since the board has two copper layers, each of which has a photo-sensitive coating, this process is carried out twice using different artworks for each side.
Next, the board is immersed in a chemical solution to develop the latent image. The developer washes away the unexposed photo-resist, leaving only material that was polymerised and which corresponds to the pad and tracks. The areas of the copper film that aren't protected by the remaining polymerised portions of the photoresist are etched away.
In an oxidation reaction, metallic copper is transformed into a copper salt, which is water-soluble and therefore washes off during the etching. For quick etching, the board passes through a chamber in which the etchant is sprayed at a high pressure and at a temperature of about 50C.
After etching, the board is washed to remove surplus etchant and the remaining photo-resist is removed using an organic solvent. The insulating fibreglass board now has a pattern of copper tracks on each side that will form the circuit's interconnections. This assembly is called a core.
However, motherboards have a multilayer construction, which means they have more than two copper layers. This means that the above process has to be carried out several times. In the case of a six-layer motherboard, two of these cores will be needed to provide four of those layers. We'll see later how the other two layers are made.
4. Building up a stack
Double-sided cores are now sandwiched together to start the creation of a multilayer PCB. Two cores are used for a six-layer board (a common figure for motherboards), but they can't be stacked directly on top of each other because this would cause the copper tracks on the top of the bottom core to short with the tracks on the bottom of the top core.
To stop this from happening, a sheet of prepreg is placed between them. Sheets of prepreg are also applied to the top and bottom of the stack before it's subjected to pressure and a high temperature to complete the curing of the prepreg and bond everything together.
For a six-layer board, the stack would comprise: prepreg / core / prepreg / core / prepreg. This means that the final result will be: fibreglass / copper / fibreglass / copper / fibreglass / copper / fibreglass / copper / fibreglass.
5. Drilling the holes
Holes are now drilled through the board. First come the mounting holes, which will be used for mechanical fixing (bolting the motherboard into the PC's case).
Second are the holes that are used to accommodate the leads of through-hole components when they're soldered to the board in a couple of steps' time.
Finally, there are the tiny holes that form vias (vertical interconnect access), which make electrical connections between the various copper layers – or will, when we get to routing, testing and QA.
Despite the use of a high-speed, numerically controlled drilling machine, drilling can be a very time-consuming process, especially if lots of different hole sizes are required. For this reason, it's common to stack boards together so that several are drilled at once, saving time and money.
6. Copper and tin plating
Electro-plating would be an obvious choice to make the vias conductive, except for one minor problem: only already-conducting surfaces can be electro-plated. To get around this, the board is immersed in various chemicals that coat its entire surface with a thin layer of copper. It's a slow method and very expensive, but it provides just enough conducting metal to electro-plate over the top.
Electro-plating the entire board would be wasteful because most of the copper would subsequently be etched away to produce the pads and tracks on the outer layers of the PCB. Instead a photo-resist is applied, exposed to UV light through an artwork and developed as when fabricating the copperclad laminate – but with one important alteration.
Here, a different type of artwork is used so that the photo-resist remains in those areas that don't correspond to the pads and tracks of the finished board. Now the electro-plating will only increase the thickness of the copper on the areas without the insulating photo-resist.
The board is finally electroplated with tin, which, once again, only adheres to those areas of the board that will form the pads and tracks. The tin serves three purposes: it prevents the copper tarnishing; it provides a surface that can be soldered to more easily than copper; and it acts as a resist (after first removing the remaining photo-resist) in the next process – etching away the unwanted copper.
We now have a PCB with copper pads and tracks on the outer two surfaces, tracks on four internal layers, and vias making the necessary connections between the various layers.
To complete the bare PCB, a solder mask and component identification are applied via silkscreen printing. The solder mask covers all of the board where solder shouldn't adhere when the components are fixed in place. This prevents unwanted bridges between tracks that could occur during wave soldering in step 9.
The component identification provides a visible labelling of each of the components with their serial numbers. This is useful in manual inspection or board maintenance.
7. Routing, testing and QA
Steps 2 to 7 involved the processing of a panel – a sheet of material comprising several motherboard PCBs. Now the individual boards are separated using a numerically controlled router, which is also used to create any non-plated larger holes and slots that are needed.
The board is then given a going over by a 'bed-of-nails' tester, an automated process that probes both sides of the board to ensure that electrical pathways exist where they are supposed to and that there are no shorts.
Finally, before leaving the PCB fabrication facility, the motherboard is given a QA inspection to ensure it meets its specification in terms of the overall board size, mounting hole tolerances and so on.
8. Surface mounting
The first components to be soldered onto the bare PCB are the surface mountings. Solder paste – a mixture of solder powder and flux – is printed onto those pads on the top surface of the board where the contacts of the surface-mounting components (SMCs) will be soldered. The SMCs are placed on the board using a pick-and-place machine.
The tackiness of the solder paste holds the components in place, but they're not fixed securely and there isn't a proper electrical connection.
The next stage is reflux soldering. The PCB is placed in a reflux oven and heated to over 200C. The solder in the paste melts and then solidifies when the board cools down again, providing good electrical connections and fixing the components securely.
9. Through-hole components
Next the larger through-hole components are fitted, often on a manual production line. Included are the processor socket, the memory and expansion card slots and the various connectors such as keyboard, mouse, audio and video sockets. The components are fitted to the top side of the board with their pins protruding through pads on the bottom side of the board.
The board then enters a wave soldering machine. This contains a tank of molten solder that's pumped across a submerged edge, causing a raised wave of solder. As the board progresses through this apparatus, each part of the bottom side of the board comes into contact with the solder wave. The solder adheres to the board wherever it's free of solder resist, thereby making mechanical and electrical connections between the component leads and the pads.
10. Final testing and packaging
For final testing, processor and memory modules are plugged into their sockets. External PC components such as a hard disk, CD/DVD drive, monitor, keyboard and so on are also plugged into their appropriate connectors. With the motherboard now effectively built into a complete PC, a full functional test involving every socket is carried out.
This is mostly an automated process, although humans do still have a part in the process for areas like audio circuitry. All this is followed up with a 'burn-in' test, which involves running diagnostic software on the motherboard for a protracted time while it's subjected to high temperatures and temperature cycles.
If the board passes this test, which is designed to cause any potentially faulty components to fail, the motherboard is complete. All that remains is for the finished board to be packaged in an antistatic bag and box, and it's ready to take pride of place in a new PC.
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