GammaTech debuts Durabook D14 E-Series with 1TB of storage
By Donald Melanson 
posted January 19th 2010 11:45AM
posted January 19th 2010 11:45AM
We got ourselves pretty well acquainted with one of GammaTech's Durabooks early last year, and the company is now finally back with another model that breaks a bit of new ground in the world of rugged laptops. While there may well be tougher laptops out there, GammaTech's new Durabook D14 E-Series is apparently the first fully rugged laptop to come equipped with 1TB of storage, which still has to count for something these days. Other than that addition, however, the laptop is fairly similar to the company's previous D14RM model, and packs a 14.1-inch screen, a Core 2 Duo processor "greater than 2GHz," up to 8GB of RAM, and your choice of RAID-0 or RAID-1 configuration options for those dual 500GB hard drives. No official word on a price just yet, but you can pretty safely bet on paying a premium over the $1,500 that the standard D14RM demands.
Duracell won't be happy
RAID 1 surely... In a rugged laptop.
@Oli D The GammaTech Durabook D-14 E-Series Notebook offers 1TB of HDD storage space in a rugged-ready build to survive the toughest of working conditions. This promises to work even on gamma conditions.. Details: http://bit.ly/gammatech-details
Still waiting on a 1tb 9.5mm high laptop hard drive...The only 1tb one out is 12.5mm high.
I've got a ton of these in the office that I support as purchased by the previous IT person I replaced. After some evaluation of these systems I've found that they aren't any more durable than any other normal laptop. Aside from some rubber corners and a foam barrier holding the hard drive (which auto-park anyway) there's nothing special in them. I have been slowly replacing them with Thinkpads, which carry a longer warranty, have similar protective features, faster processors, better screens, larger hard drives for about $200 to $300 less.
I've had to send a few in for service to Gammatech and it took over a month to return the laptops back to me.
Bottom line - I'm less than impressed with this laptop. Are they bad? Nope - just not worth it when compared to other brands/models.
Brian