Pros: you can reuse the sata drives in an enclosure that works

Cons: I have owned this Fantom G-Force MegaDisk MDC1000 for almost two years. In that time it has gone back for repair once, had both drives replaced, and replaced the fan three times. The drive is in a server clean room too. When i first purchased the drive from newegg, it didn't even work out of the box with the original firmware. It would constantly lose the raid and was extremely slow. It would freeze up after about 20 minutes of file transfer. Tech support told me to wait for the new firmware which would fix that behavior. I did wait for 3 months. It did fix many of the issues, however, this is when the drives started failing. It was faster though. The big problem is the periodic (roughly 2x a week) loss of part of the raid array, and the constant rebuilding of the array.

Other Thoughts: The case is designed, at least on mine, so that the power port on the back is just slightly offset from the hole in the aluminum case, which doesn't allow the cord to sit well in the case. This results a reboot if any slight contact is made with the case or cord.
It has been a while since I was snookered by a really lousy piece of hardware like this one, but I took a chance on fantom, and I paid for it.
At least I can reuse the drives in a different case, and recycle the fantom case.

Pros: Two pretty lights.

Cons: I'm an independent film maker who bought two of these drives to store the footage for my movie-one for editing, the other for back up.

First drive was taken out of the box, data tranfered, and editing begun. That took a couple of weeks. Second drive was taken out of the box, data from first drive was backed up. Second drive failed one day later. First drive failed two days after that.

I now have to go buy two more hard drives from (darn near) any other manufacturer and hope I don't miss my festival deadline.

Other Thoughts: If you dreamily order this product thinking it won't happen to you and it does, don't say you weren't warned.

I gave this one star because I am not allowed to give it no stars.

Pros: Works well, when it works.

Cons: After about a year, the controller board that works the ports started to die, and then died -- so although the 2 drives inside (RAIDed as they are; 2 500 GM drives together) are fine, and the data is fine, there is no way to get it out or access it. So we have to do data recovery which is expensive, involving removing the 2 inner drives and putting them in another enclosure with the same controller.

Other Thoughts: Because this drive is not a single drive, but 2 drives RAIDed together, that makes getting the data off much harder -- were it one drive with the same problem, we could take it out and mount it in one of our MACs and it would function as an internal extra drive. But due to the RAID, if we installed the 2 drives as individuals, of course all the data would be lost. If there's another solution we can't figure it out, and this is very troublesome, since the data on the drive is very important.

Manufacturer Response:

Please go to our website and fill out an RMA request form and we will service your unit for you. If you have any questions please give us a call at 1(800)800-DISK(3475) select option # 2 for Technical Support.

Pros: looks pretty

Cons: wont mount consistently on a mac.

Other Thoughts: all show and no go!

returned two of these in one week. the first had a bad power converter and the second had a bad drive.

word to the wise... tech support says they don't seem to play nice with macs so be warned.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for your feedback. Sorry to hear you were having trouble with your unit. MacOSX has difficulty working with drives larger than 1.0tb in size which we address in our FAQ section on our website. Please see the link below for instructions on formatting you drive properly:

http://www.micronet.com/support/macfaqs.htm

If you have any questions please send us an email to customercare@fantomdrives.com or give us a call at 1(800)800-DISK(3475) select option #2 for Technical Support.

Pros: Reasonably fast, reasonably quiet, pretty cheap, looks nice

Cons: Fails w/ total data loss. I had this unit for about 7 months and it failed. Sent it back to FD and they repaired it under warranty. 11 months later, it failed again. This time, however, it did not fall under their warranty (only 90 days on repaired units). I will NOT be buying FD products in the future.

Other Thoughts: Look to other brands if you care about reliability.

Pros: Worked great for a year!!

Cons: FAN is no longer spinning and drive is now overheating and thus unusable. It's just out of warranty too. :(

Thankfully I was able to freeze the drive about a dozen times in order to recover my data. I was using this drive as my backup.

Manufacturer Response:

If you would like us to replace the Fan please go to our website and fill out an RMA request form and we will service your drive for you. If you have any questions please send an email to customercare@fantomdrives.com so we can address your issue.

Pros: Nifty-looking case.

Cons: Product is worthless. Purchased 5/07. First one failed completely on the 31st day. Newegg was kind enough to replace. Take two; second drive works, but I had intermittent problems the entire time. It seemed as if it would randomly decide whether to mount or not depending on it's mood. Two months ago fan died and just about everything else on the board failed. Luckily, the drives themselves are fine and I've had to put them in another enclosure. But these drives have been a problem from the start.

Pros: Cheap. Worked fine for a while.

Cons: I've purchased a total of 3 Fantom products (2 of these drives & 1 NAS RAID unit). The NAS constantly went offline & I could not get the issue resolved. The controller in the 1TB unit like this one, failed after just over one year of use.

Other Thoughts: All 3 units are now in the junk pile. I'll never use another Fantom product. I replaced all 3 units with similar Cavalry products which perform better & are much more reliable in my experience.

Pros: Sturdy construction, high storage capacity for the cost.

Cons: Power connection on the unit is not 100% secure, if the cord gets moved the unit occasionally loses power for a split second (which of course disconnects the drive from the machine, corrupting any transfers).

When connected via USB, the unit always shows up. As some other reviewers have said, when connected via either firewire connection however, the drive shows up maybe half the time.

Questionable HD brands... this unit had two Hitachi drives in it, but Fantom drives I've used before have also had refurbed drives in them.

Other Thoughts: All in all, decent drives, but after having assembled a 1TB external out of a $50 Rosewill case and two Western Digital 500GB drives (@75 a piece), you can assemble an external drive and have it up and formatting in a matter of minutes for roughly the same cost, and you know you are using quality components.

Pros: This drive looks cool.

Cons: So far I have experienced many problem with this drive. About 50% of the time it boots on and everything goes just fine. But the other 50% of boot ups and randomly during use the drive will just disappear, dismount or just refuse to work.

Other Thoughts: I would recommend a different drive, no one wants an unreliable drive with important data on it.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for your feedback. It sounds like there may a problem with the bridgeboard. Please give us a call at 1(800)800-DISK(3475) select option #2 for Technical Support and we will do our best to address your issue.