Articles by Desire Athow, Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

Then followed a weekly tech column in a local business magazine in Mauritius, a late night tech radio programme called Clicplus and a freelancing gig at the now-defunct, Theinquirer, with the late Mike Magee as mentor. After an eight-year stint at ITProPortal.com, where he discovered the joys of global techfests and transformed the publication into one of the biggest tech B2B independent publishers, Désiré moved to TechRadar Pro where he has been the editor for nine years.

He has an affinity for anything hardware and staunchly refuses to stop writing reviews of obscure products or cover niche B2B software-as-a-service providers. He is an avid deal hunter and can be found lurking around on various deals forums.

Articles by: Desire Athow

Controversial hard drive vendor breaks new record with cheapest HDD yet

By Desire Athow last updated 20 February 24

12TB for under $90 with full three year warranty? What’s the trick?

A Yubico YubiKey 5 NFC, the best security key of 2024, against a techradar background

The best security key of 2024: hardware keys for top online protection

By John Loeffler last updated 20 February 24

Updated Secure your online accounts with our picks for the best security keys.

Best secure router of 2024

By Collin Probst last updated 14 February 24

Looking for the best secure router? These are our top picks.

We’ve got $10 10K HDMI video cables already on sale — so where are these cheap 8K monitors?

By Desire Athow published 4 February 24

After an initial promising start, it seems that 8K, at least on desktop, is just a fad.

Exclusive: Seagate explains why it didn’t sell a 60TB SSD in 2016 — and when it plans to finally release a 60TB HDD to the world

By Desire Athow published 3 February 24

You see, it’s all about priorities and expectations.

Forget about AMD’s fantastic 96-core Threadripper Pro 7995WX — Dollar for dollar, its little-known 192-thread sibling is a far, far better deal

By Desire Athow published 31 January 24

AMD slashed the price of the EPYC 9654 by almost 67 percent and nobody really knows why

Adata UE800 1TB SSD on a window sill during our test and review process

Adata Elite UE800 1TB USB flash drive review: Move over traditional external SSDs, there’s a new kid on the storage block

By Desire Athow published 30 January 24

We put the Adata Elite UE800 1TB portable SSD to the test.

Exclusive: Samsung to launch Petabyte SSD subscription — PBSSD-as-a-service is definitely not your usual cloud storage service, at least not for now

By Desire Athow published 25 January 24

Samsung embracing storage-as-a-service in a big way - but what will its customers think?

Isometric server-side processing concept

‘Future servers could have a shared DPU’: Could the next decade see a rise in socket heterogeneity?

By Desire Athow published 21 January 24

Dual-socket servers may no longer be the 'be all and end all', with single-socket and quad-socket servers more viable than we thought.

A Samsung 990 Pro on a wooden table in front of its retail packaging

Could this be the Samsung 1000 Pro SSD in disguise — details of the PM9E1, the company’s first PCIe 5.0 end-user SSD emerge and the numbers look good

By Desire Athow last updated 18 January 24

Almost four years after launching a PCIe 5.0 for hyperscalers, Samsung finally launches an end user version

Seagate launches biggest hard drive ever — 30TB Exos Mozaic 3+ HDD can store more than 1,000 Blu-ray movies and, yes, everyone will be able to buy them

By Desire Athow published 17 January 24

Seagate is first to reach 30TB barrier, just over three years after the first 20TB hard drives appeared.

A representative abstraction of artificial intelligence

If you want to run AI training and inference on almost any GPU, then this startup may be the answer

By Desire Athow published 14 January 24

Akash augments existing IT infrastructure to optimize it for the AI age.

Exclusive: First 2TB MicroSD card is now on sale and no, it is not expensive at all — Taiwanese company makes my dream of building a petabyte-in-a-shoebox project become true

By Desire Athow published 12 January 24

In a surprising twist, AGI becomes first manufacturer to launch a 2TB microSD card.

The new Razer Blade 18 could well be the fastest mobile workstation ever — with Thunderbolt 5, a rumored desktop GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, 8TB SSD, 96GB RAM and a massive 18-inch display

By Desire Athow published 11 January 24

Gamers, professionals and content creators of the world will envy this fascinating laptop.

I have been writing about tech for 25 years: these are 5 affordable productivity gadgets I’m looking to buy in 2024

By Desire Athow published 27 December 23

This year, my goal is to be as productive as possible while being comfortable and happy

I held the future of data storage in my hands and it couldn't look weirder - 2024 could be the year DNA storage goes mainstream and it couldn't come sooner

By Desire Athow published 25 December 23

A €1,000 DNA card drive with a 1KB capacity is not what you’d expect the future of storage to look like, and yet...

Startup wants to rival Nvidia and end GPU shortage by going back to basics — betting on CPUs may not seem a great idea but just hear these guys out

By Desire Athow published 23 December 23

With GPUs in really high demand, there might be a way to configure CPUs to be a reliable stopgap solution to getting your AI dream off the ground

Integral Memory SlimXpress SSD during our tests

Integral Memory SlimXpress 1TB portable SSD review: a solid performer with a great price tag

By Desire Athow published 8 December 23

Great Value

An external solid state drive from a UK-based vendor that’s average in looks and average in performance

AMD’s most exciting mobile Ryzen launch in 2023 was about how powerful its XDNA 2 NPU will be — a 300% improvement in AI performance is a game changer

By Desire Athow published 7 December 23

As fantastic as Hawk Point is, all eyes will be on Strix Point as XDNA 2 looms on the AI Horizon

"1KB now, 100PB for $150,000 in 2026, 1000PB+ in 2030": Biomemory CEO sheds more light on mind boggling expectations for its DNA Storage platform

By Desire Athow published 6 December 23

But expect to pay a huge early adopter premium as DNA storage matures at lightning speed.

Samsung T5 Evo portable SSD during our tests

Samsung Portable SSD T5 Evo (8TB) review

By Desire Athow published 5 December 23

The first true 8TB external SSD finally lands but fails to impress on pricing and performance.

DNA storage finally reaches mainstream (well, sort of) — but it will cost you a whopping $1,000 per KB (yes, kilobyte)

By Desire Athow published 4 December 23

French startup you've never heard of unveils tiny DNA storage device that costs more than the first hard drive.

This tiny, cute pocket laptop that transforms into a tablet is a digital nomad’s dream — and we have just reviewed it

By Desire Athow last updated 26 November 23

Updated This is one of the smallest laptops on the market and it can transform into a tablet

I just received the world’s first 2TB USB flash drive available for review — I just wish it was available for sale on Black Friday

By Desire Athow published 23 November 23

Silicon Power calls its a portable SSD but for all intents and purposes, it is a good ol’ thumb drive

This incredibly minuscule all-in-one Windows PC is the ideal touchscreen device for remote workers — shame it doesn’t have a built-in battery

By Desire Athow published 23 November 23

The ability to run three monitors simultaneously in a tiny footprint is something that won’t go unnoticed

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