Home Theater

Price: US $105 000

http://www.edgonline.com

When most people talk about home theater, they usually mean a flat-screen TV, a few speakers, and a comfy chair. Not so for those who possess the means and the space to create a true domestic cinema experience.

PHOTO: THOMAS LOOF

NERVE CENTER: This rack of high-end equipment includes an HDTV satellite receiver, a DVR, a DVD player, and a digital VHS player.

Companies such as the Electronics Design Group Inc. (EDG), in Piscataway, N.J., can install electronics and furnishings that would put your local multiplex to shame, so Ken Nodes hired EDG to build a home theater in his basement. His cinema [see photo, "A Night In"], which seats 12, boasts a 100-inch-diagonal screen illuminated by a ceiling-mounted digital light processing (DLP) projector. Nodes can choose the audio-video signal from a rack-mounted high-definition satellite TV receiver, a DVR, a DVD player, or a digital VHS tape player. Sound arrives through freestanding and wall-mounted speakers powered by a seven-channel amplifier. Nodes says the picture and sound quality are "flawless."

In addition, the lighting and curtains are computer controlled. The viewer can command the entire theater using a remote control with a touch screen. Tapping "DVD," for example, will automatically dim the lights, close the window curtains, turn on the projector, and switch to the DVD player's feed. Nodes is especially pleased with the seamlessness of the remote-control integration. He had used a different contractor to install home-automation equipment some years previously, only to find it plagued with malfunctions.

Nodes estimates the cost of the electronics at around US $75 000 and the basement conversion and furnishings at $30 000, but he says it's worth the price tag and his cinema is "better than going to a movie theater." If you're interested in a similar setup, the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association, an international trade group headquartered in Indianapolis, can help you find a reputable contractor at http://www.cedia.net.

Fortress Hard Drive

Price: US $499 to $850

http://www.4tress.com

Anyone who has had a laptop computer stolen or suffered a disk-drive meltdown will appreciate that the value of lost or broken hardware pales in comparison with the value of the data stored on that hardware. Enter the Fortress family of external hard drives. Their maker, Fortress Corp., in Mountain View, Calif., reckons the high price of its hardware is really an investment in protecting the data stored onboard. At US $499, its 40-gigabyte model is about two to five times the price of a similarly sized regular, external hard drive.

Here's why: a Fortress drive is virtually indestructible, certainly by anything to be encountered outside a war zone. Its specs claim it can brush off a 1.8-meter fall onto concrete, so suppressing years of data-preserving caution, I loaded one with files, lifted the paperback book­size drive to head height, and dropped it onto a concrete floor. Twice.

This punishment would have reduced most external hard drives to badly dented paperweights, but the nickel-plated aluminum casing of the Fortress drive wasn't even scratched. (The casing is milled, not cast, to shape, increasing its strength.) And once I reconnected the drive, all my data was there. The Fortress comes with both FireWire and USB 2.0 connections and works happily with Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Macintosh systems.

A check against the original files showed that not a single bit had been mangled. Furthering my own tests, members of IEEE Spectrum's art department also repeatedly dropped the unit onto concrete while photographing it [see photo, "Tough Tech"]: although they did scuff the casing, gouging some small pits and dents into the metal, the drive again behaved perfectly when tested later. The Fortress drive can even be operated in tough environments, such as on board a helicopter with its severe vibrations.

Another feature I like is that the drive has an internal heat sink, meaning that it never got hot during operation, as many drives do, including those in most laptops. This adds to the Fortress's dependability. Its stated mean time between failures (MTBF), a standard measure of disk drive reliability, is 500 000 hours, comparable to that of a drive that spends its life in a cushy desktop computer environment. And this is considerably better than that of many external hard drives, where an MTBF of 300 000 hours is common and numbers as low as 100 000 hours are not unknown.

Other options for storing data safely do exist, but they are not generally easily portable. One such example is a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) system, which stores data in such a way that if one drive fails, data can be recovered from other drives in the array. The relatively small capacity of even the largest Fortress drive—the choices top out at 120 gigabytes—makes it impractical for storing complete backups of a desktop computer system, as desktop hard drives routinely ship with up to 250 GB today. But for someone who needs to transport important data or to work in the field, a Fortress drive can't be beaten—literally.