There are apparently an awful, awful lot of people out there with shoe boxes full of spare SATA drives.
Somebody is buying all these new
HDD docks, and while most surpass the previous editions by adding support for another obscure format of memory card, Brando's latest seems like an actually useful update, adding HDMI and component ports through which it can output video at either 1080i or the
always popular 576p. Standard resolutions may not be its strong point, and sadly there's no mention of which video codecs it can unravel, but it does at least support the major flavors of audio files (MP3, WMA, AAC, etc.) and of course will read memory cards and thumb drives to boot. No, a bare drive may not look particularly appealing while rattling away on your entertainment center, and at $69 you're not far from the price of a Windows Media extender or the like, but don't let such practical concerns dissuade you from adding this unique focal point to your home theater.
posted June 1st 2009 12:47PM
That's pretty nice. Although seems like overkill when one can just plug it into their laptop for hdmi, but its the thought that counts.
Also first E3 conference starts in like 31min.
Yes, because everyone has a laptop with HDMI outputs.
this is just brandoculous.
Why the snide remark about 576p?
Because they're jealous.
Engadget is just oblivious to the world outside north america
And I remember when their picture representing Europe was the UK map
576p is PAL resolution.
so... will it play on my ntsc tv?
Give it to me baby!
This looks great but is lacking a bit in format and resolution support. If they could get it up to the level of the WD TV I'd get one.
I personally have loads of 500GB disks around after I upgraded all my backup drives. I bought the Brando dual SATA dock and essentially use them like floppy disks. They're faster than pen drives with much more capacity so it works well.
This blog post : http://terrywhite.com/techblog/?p=2190 talks about a hard drive protector... for when you are using a "bare" hard drive that is not mounted. Maybe it would work with a Brando?
Because it has electrolytes!
how sweet
not sure about others, but we have a few Vantec NexStar SATA docks here at work. Very handy for popping in a user's HDD to copy files off or image the drive or whatever. We used to us a USB to IDE/SATA cable, the Vantec is e-SATA.
"There are apparently an awful, awful lot of people out there with shoe boxes full of spare IDE drives."
There we go. I fixed that for you, Engadget. It's too bad it now breaks the story.
how does that fix it? This device is for SATA drives, so they got it right.
add an acrylic case w/ USB bus powered fans and you have a little media pc.
If you were going to use acrylic, it would have to have ALOT of holes in it for airflow to be ok. Typical acrylic used in PC mods isn't very thin, so getting fresh cool air into the box is hard. In a normal PC case, its easy.
I say put holes on the side, a 90mm fan on the top (120 is wider than a drive), vibration dampeners all around with everything screwed in properly. Oh, and make it mount properly in a 5.25 slot and slide out just enough to press buttons.
Hell, might as well make it two drives then :)
Brando! It's got what SATA HDD's crave!
"There are apparently an awful, awful lot of people out there with shoe boxes full of spare SATA drives
Yea, i am one of those :P
I'd rather buy a $70 dock and a drive than have to build a new machine because I'm out of mounts in my tower....
Does the HDMI handle audio? How does this handle protected content (HDCP)?