For all the readers living in the United States, Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you get all the food, drink and of course plenty of Black Friday shopping after!

Today and for the next 48 hours, we’ll be scouring the internet for the best Black Friday deals on technology, computer hardware, and other generally awesome deals you may want to check out. We’ll keep this post updated with all the latest deals, so check back often!

 

CPCR Black Friday Picks Laptops MSI GL62M 7RDX-NE1050i5 15.6″ (Core i5 7300HQ, GTX 1050, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD) – $599 After $50 Rebate MSI GS73VR STEALTH PRO-060 17.3″ (Core i7-7700HQ GTX 1070 8G MAX Q [...]

As prices of last generation servers continue to decrease, internet speeds continue to increase, and NAS systems become much more feature rich, many people are now opting to setup their own home servers or NAS systems.

If you don’t own your own home server or NAS system, here are five top uses for a home server or NAS.

 

Network Storage

The most common use for a home server or NAS is using it as a network storage. After all, the acronym NAS itself stands for Network Attached Storage.

Typically referred to as a “shared drive”, network storage typically employs the NFS (Network File System) or SMB (Server Message Block) [...]

Following Toshiba’s announcement of their QLC BiCS 3D NAND last month, Toshiba’s FlashForward NAND development joint venture partner Western Digital recently also announced their own 4-bit per cell QLC 3D NAND product which they refer to as X4.

According to the press release, the WD’s X4 features up to 64-layers of BiCS 3D NAND with a maximum die capacity of up to 768Gb (96GB) per die, or a 50% increase in storage capacity compared to previous generation 512Gb 3-bit per cell X3 NAND.

Currently WD hasn’t revealed any information on plans for future products based on the new NAND. WD will show off the new X4 3D NAND at FMS 2017 in [...]

Those looking for the absolute highest capacity HDDs for their NAS without breaking the bank will now have an option of purchasing the WD Red and the WD Red Pro in up to 10TB capacities.

In order to reach the new capacities, the new Red and Red Pro drives utilize WD’s HelioSeal technology where WD seals the drives and fills them with helium in order to cram more platters into the drive. This is a technology that has already been utilized on WD’s enterprise class drives, however, is now making its way into WD’s NAS drives for the first time. In addition to HelioSeal technology, the new drives will also include several NAS optimized features such [...]

Western Digital has released their first ever external drive powered by SSD technology.

Dubbed the My Passport SSD, the new external SSD features up to 1TB of storage in an ultraportable 1.8 inch x 3.5 inch x 0.39 inch form factor. Thanks to its SSD internals, the drive is capable of performance of up to 515MB/s over USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) and will feature adapters for compatibility with USB Type-A as well as USB Type-C connectors. For peace of mind, the drive also features industry standard AES 256-bit hardware encryption, and is durable enough to withstand a 6.5 foot drop and up to 1500G of force.

The WD My Passport SSD will MSRP at $99.99 for the 256GB, [...]

According to a recent announcement, Western Digital is bumping up the maximum capacity of its WD Purple HDD to 10TB.

The WD Purple 10TB, designed for home/business video surveillance applications, has a slew of technologies catered towards video recording. These technologies include tarnish-resistant components to improve reliability, storage platters encased in helium to reduce resistance when spinning, and AllFrame 4K technology to enhance ATA reduces video frame loss and pixelation. As a result, the WD Purple 10TB is capable of operating 24/7 and can support recording up to 64 simultaneous HD streams.

“Advanced imaging technology advancements are [...]

Welcome to Custom PC Review’s Best Gaming PC Builds! If you’re looking to build a new computer to play all the latest games, but you’re unsure of what parts to buy to create the optimal build at a certain price-point, we’re here to help.

Below you’ll find four builds sorted by budget of what we think will help create the best and most powerful gaming PCs for the price. Each piece of hardware in each build is hand-picked by our staff through consideration of a multitude of criteria such as price, performance, reliability, and cost. Furthermore, hardware recommend for our builds all have either been reviewed by us or is well known and [...]

Introduction

Being an Editor here at Custom PC Review, I’m constantly in need of lots of mass storage. At CES 2017, I took over 1,000 14-bit RAW images using a Nikon D800 camera which generated files somewhere between 40MB-45MB each. After exporting them, another set of images are then created which take less, but still require quite a significant amount of storage space. Tack that onto 50Mbps 1080p video along with the thought of possibly doing 4K video down the road and the need for lots of reliable storage quickly adds up.

Of course, the easy solution is to throw a couple hard drives into your PC because that’s cheap and easy, but I also wanted the [...]

WD recently launched the HGST branded Ultrastar SN200 and SS200 series Enterprise NVMe SSDs.

The Ultrastar SN200 series, which is available in HHHL or SFF 2.5″ form factors will be offered in capacities of 800GB to 7.68TB. What’s most impressive here is performance as the flagship drive features sequential read performance up to 6.1GB/s and random read performance up to 1.2 Million IOPS, a massive 100% increase in sequential reads and 61% increase random reads over their last generation drive.

In addition to the Ultrastar SS200 series, WD is also introducing the HGST branded Ultrastar SS200 SAS Enterprise SSDs. Available in the SFF 2.5″ [...]

While SSDs are quickly replacing HDDs in both the consumer and enterprise space, HDDs are still less expensive per gigabyte compared to its solid state competition and is still very cost effective for applications where high capacity is needed, but performance isn’t paramount.

At Western Digital’s Investor Day 2016, WD recently launched their new 4th Generation He12 Helium HDD which features an eight-disk design.  This is achieved through the use of their HelioSeal process technology which uses helium in the drive to allow WD to utilize thinner disks thanks to helium’s significantly lighter density.

As such, WD is able to deliver up to [...]