Reviews round-up: Acronyms of the week

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It's amazing to think that lots of information about a product can be stored on a small tag containing an integrated circuit and an antenna – especially the passive type that doesn't even require a battery. Well, I think it's amazing anyway.

Even if you don't think it's amazing, if your company needs to keep track of stock then being able to simply and easily produce your own ID tags is a pretty useful thing, which is where the Zebra RZ400 RFID printer comes in. It enables you to spit out RFID tags in a roll using thermal dye-sublimation print technology. It's pretty easy to use and won't require too much maintenance. The initial outlay is quite high but it could make it a lot easier to keep track of your stock levels.

If you're a tech head, you'll know that we've been waiting for SSDs to become mainstream for a long time, but the past year or so has been exciting in that its really start to be seen to be happening. SSDs are now commonplace in many high-end laptops – think Apple MacBook Air and Lenovo X300, and most netbooks use them as well. However, while we always new that struggled what it came to price and capacity compared to conventional drives it was for a long time a given that they just won, when it came to performance.

Well it turns out it's not as simple as that – and to prove it we put a 64GB SSD drive through its paces with some testing of our own. It's from Traxdata – a spin off brand of Ritek, and uses SLC – which for those who care is the 'fast' type of SSD drive – Single Layer Cell – doesn't cram data in the way MLC – Multi Layer Cell drives do, making the data easier to extract and increasing performance. However, it's expensive to produce at the moment, hence the £600 Traxdata wants for this drive.

For comparison we lined it up against a 'normal' drive, a big (as in capacious) and cheap drive from Toshiba. With 400GB for only 75 quid from the Tosh, the Traxdata needs to blow the Toshiba out of the water to make a case for itself. So does it? Find out here.

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