SR wird leben !

SR Lives! 18 February 2002

Albeit a bit downsized, StorageReview.com will remain! Over the past 1.5 months while we’ve maintained a necessarily silent pursuit of various buyouts, hosting options, sponsorships, and other leads, readers have continually poured in uplifting messages of support that we truly took to heart.
We’ve received 1000+ messages offering assistance of various sorts, from free hosting to system administration services to webmastering. Though we couldn’t pursue many of these offers, we’re nonetheless flattered and offer our thanks to those who offered to help.

In the end, all of the buyout and merger offers presented to us weren’t terribly attractive. It became clear that it would be best to keep SR running independently in some fashion. Though the internet ad market continues to remain extremely weak, we figured that if we cut hosting costs that one dedicated person could eek out a modest living while carrying the torch forward. This individual is me. Davin, my partner since the inception of SR, is moving onwards to a full-time job elsewhere. Please join me in wishing him the best of luck in his future endeavors.

This doesn’t mean he hasn’t been busy polishing up SR! Even after it was clear he was leaving his full-time duties behind, he’s polished up SR’s brand-new Testbed3 database. Our main deployment goal was to greatly simplify what used to be a very intimidating interface used to sort drives within tests and to compare drives with each other. Check it out and let us know if we’ve succeeded!

StorageReview.com’s New Drive Database

Davin will also standby to assist me with little HTML chores here and there. The large loss will be in things you don’t really notice as often… various nifty programs here and there (the new database is one example) that made SR a bit more smooth a place to visit. Over the years associate editors Tim Zakharov and Terry Baranski have chipped in to expand SR’s coverage into CDRW and RAID sectors. Regrettably we’ll have to scale back on those sectors. Both fine individuals have run into situations where they must devote more time to their non-SR lives. I offer my thanks to both for years of dedicated hard work.

That said, SR’s mainstay, hard drive reviews, will move onwards! First, our popular Leaderboard, an at-a-glance list of the best products around, has been updated to reflect the ascension of the Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB as today’s premiere ATA hard drive:

StorageReview.com’s Leaderboard

Second, I’ve got many more reviews in the pipeline. Soon to come are evaluations of Western Digital’s 5400 RPM Caviar WD800AB and two drives from IBM- the SCSI Ultrastar 73LZX and the much-anticipated Deskstar 120GXP. Here and now, however, we’re pleased to present a review of a drive from a manufacturer that doesn’t receive as much press as others. How does Samsung’s 7200 RPM SpinPoint P40 stack up? Read on and find out!

Samsung SpinPoint P40 Review

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the 100+ readers who have contributed through StorageReview.com’s Donation Jar. These folks gave to a site that for all the knew would not be around within a month… heck, I didn’t even know back then! Thanks a bunch!

It’s likely that StorageReview.com will eventually debut coverage that will be available on a subscription basis. This would consist of expanded hard drive tests as well as additional studies extending beyond traditional reviews. The reviews that many of you have come to trust will remain available at no cost. Should I choose this route, I will gladly roll all donations into the program.

Now as we move forward I really need your support more than ever! The StorageReview.com forums were undoubtedly the biggest casualty of our recent database catastrophe. For multiple reasons the community has fractured and is perhaps not the place that many avid participants remember. I’ve committed myself long-term to SR; the best thing you as a reader can do to help me out is to participate within the community to rebuild it into a place where knowledgeable folks can congregate to discuss hardware, software, and whatever else tickles their fancies!

StorageReview.com’s Community
(submitted by Eugene at 16:19 EST) - top