Between this protocol and Windows 8, it seems that 2012 will be an exciting year. [Ars Technica via Electronista]

This is painful for the vast majority of the world's online population, who live out their lives in a sub-10Mbps ghetto, but doubly so for South Korea, who seemed to have the claim to the first 1Gbps connection all locked up. If it's any consolation, nobody's even claiming they'll be able to hit 1Gbps here.

Of course, there will be disadvantages. 1Gbps connections surely won't come cheap, and seriously, beyond extremely well-seeded torrents, you're going to have trouble finding too many places that are willing to serve you content at over 128 megabytes per second. But still, this hurts. UPDATE: Apparently Japan might already have this? Well, screw you guys too. [Broadband TV News]

Reaching data rates of 1000Mbps (over the former speed of 200Mbps), Belkin's new $150 Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit includes two Powerline adapters, allowing you to stream multiple uncompressed HD data feeds through your home with little issue.

Of course, these are best case scenario numbers. If your old home has lousy electrical, that theoretical spec speed could drop a lot lower. Then again, at the overkill bandwidth of 1000Mbps, it can afford to. [Belkin]

PlayStation 3 owners who want to shove a bunch of DivX/XviD movies onto a server to stream to their consoles for HD movie action will be thrilled. Less thrilling is the price: $699 in May. Those features aren't cheap, nor are the smaller laptop drives they use to power it. Then again, for about $699 you could also get a Windows Home Server, which is quite full-featured but isn't nearly as compact. On the third hand, we're not sure why you would need a NAS to be all that compact unless you were living in a tiny apartment or wanted to sneak it through customs. [Buffalo]

The following chart demonstrates the speed difference in copying each given file type over to the Storage Central Turbo. Although the chart says "Typical 100Mbps NAS device," we can safely assume that Netgear is, to some degree, referring to its own, original Storage Central:

Netgear boasts functionality close to that of a locally attached drive but with the convenience of being on the network and the security of having an automatically mirrored drive, if you choose that option during setup. On a PC, the drive actually appears as a lettered drive. Unlike many other networked storage drives, however, this one seems to want nothing to do with Macs. (Then again, in the System Requirements, Windows Vista isn't mentioned either.)

Product Page [Netgear]

The 1TB version is on sale now for $499, and the 2TB will be shipping in August. We're always looking for more storage for all the crap we amass from being on the Internet 18 hours a day (we went on a Batman comic downloading spree last week). – Jason Chen

Product Page [Hammer via Electronista]

If Microsoft is contemplating bringing out a Nano (the Nune? The Zazo?) follow-up to their repackaged Toshiba Gigabeat, this may be it. But then again, it may not.

The Toshiba Gigabeat U can charge its battery in 10 minutes to get a three-hour playback time, but only if you use the MEPUAA 10 USB adaptor (you have to buy that separately, though, boo, hiss). This DAP can also record FM broadcasts to MP3, share broadcast music also using FM and further damage your eyesight trying to distinguish all the naughty bits looking at tiny JPEG images in its OLED screen.

Here's what it can't do: play music continually for more than 3 hours 20 hours; hold more than 2GB (the U101 only has a 1GB capacity); make breakfast; fire the chauffeur. Specs and release date are after the jump.

1.1-inch OLED screen
96x96 resolution
36 grams
1-bit DAC audio processor
USB AC adaptor MEPUAA 10
Available from April 7, and the 1GB capacity U101 will set you back $118, the 2GB U201 $142. – Ad Dugdale

New Toshiba gigabit U series music players [New Launches]

For us, we prefer gigabit LAN, QoS, Wireless N, a USB port, something that looks cool, jumbo packets, and hell, even a 2.5-inch hard drive bay. Our dream router would be gigantic, but man would it move packets fast. – Jason Chen

Survey [TRENDnet via i4u]

The Storage Central Turbo should be available early 2007 wherever the old Storage Central is sold. We're looking forward to unloading our music, movies, and data onto this little metal guardian. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Netgear via eHomeUpgrade]

The wireless portion uses MIMO, which increases range, decreases dead-spots and overall gives you more speed for your money. Since it's draft 802.11N, there's no guarantee it will work with the final N products. Since the WRT350N isn't' actually available yet, you won't have to make up your mind whether to go draft N or wait for full N just yet. – Jason Chen

Wireless-N Gigabit Router with Storage Link [Linksys]

Gerry Block, the mohawked playboy of the IGN crew, whose blog has headlines like " I'm going to the 40th Anniversary Star Trek Convention in Vegas!" gives us his take over 10,000 words, and two separate two page reviews. We've read, so you don't have to!

New LLR (Lag and Latency Reduction) technology promised lower pings to any server, and MaxFPS technology promised to remove network traffic burden off the CPU in order to more fully dedicate it to working on game-performance.

Like the real modems vs. "win" modems of old (go ask your dad if you don't remember), the

Killer NIC ... bypass the Windows networking stack. This means, in theory, that the CPU comes under no load for network processing...Cutting Windows' UDP protocols out of the loop also has the potential to lower latency between user and game server.

How?

400Hhz Network Processing Unit (NPU), backed up by 64MB of onboard RAM

What else can it do?

...you'll have your own little LINUX computer running along in the bowels of your PC...interesting applications [can] be developed by the user community. Firewalls and anti-virus software could run on the NPU and screen network traffic before Windows even gets close to it. The Killer NIC also has its own USB 2.0 port, which expands its capabilities even more. A BitTorrent client designed for the NPU could run on the card and use an external USB hard drive for storage, which would make it invisible as far as Windows is concerned. Thanks to the Killer NIC's traffic prioritization capabilities, users will conceivably be able to play the most demanding games while using extra bandwidth for BitTorrent, without any performance hits due to BitTorrent CPU load or hard drive access. There are also plans for voice-chat clients designed for the NPU that'll work with USB headsets to take even more load off the CPU.

That was a big paragraph. Sorry. But it was clearly written, now, wasn't it? Good job, Gerry!

How about some satisfaction? Here's the money shot!

The improvement with the Killer NIC was noticeable and impressive. Pings to server dramatically improved, generally ranging from 17-50ms, averaging [a] 45ms [improvement]. FPS also got a nice bump, jumping our average from 74 to 86 fps.

So, he means to say that it works.

Jerry's verdict? He makes us wait a day...

Stay tuned for tomorrow's full benchmarking and final review.

Only to leave us hanging

Assigning a final score to the Killer NIC at this point in time does not seem appropriate, as we would like to spend more time comparing head-to-head performance figures for more games.

Here, we'll loan you our balls and give it a score for you: On a 10 point scale, seems it earns a 9 for innovation, performance, and the "K" knife inside. (Only missing the perfect score due to price)– Brian Lam

Killer NIC Gaming-Optimized Nework Card [ign]

The adapter is available now for $45. – Nicholas Deleon

Product Page [Belkin via Everything USB]

On the storage side, RAID 0, 1 and 5 can be configured to support four 250GB hard drives, which makes for a maximum of 1 Terabyte. Even Dean Cain couldn't handle that much Teri Hatcher.

New 1TB Iomega NAS Device Offers 802.11g [Digital Trends]