Pros: Simply outstanding drive. Works with Areca 1680ix with no issues. Very good BER rate and MTBF, only some SAS have better ratings. Fast. Have 5 of these drives mounted in Supermicro SAS/SATA drive cage. Western Digital leads the pack in quality lately.

Cons: Newegg (again) shipped the drive with minimal protection. I'm not going to punish Western Digital for this, but Newegg needs to get a better hard drive shipping policy and quit going on the cheap.

Pros: It's fast, that's about it.

Cons: Our sister business was using this, inexplicably, and was trashed with viruses they could never get rid of. Doesn't catch a thing. They ended up moving to Kas IS and M-warebytes for the weird stuff.

Overall Review: Who are all these people raving this is the best AV of all time? It doesn't even make top 50 lists. Seems fishy...

Pros: Fast, Lots of space, looks good, lots of space, has worked without a hitch or weird behavior, lots of space.

Cons: Outer aluminum casing came loose from the USB end. Ended up supergluing the two pieces together and it's fine now. Not the best if I try to sell it at some point in the future and upgrade. Also the cap is very easy to lose. Took one star for these two issues.

Overall Review: Still overall a good product and recommended. Hope to see 2nd gen with the cap issue addressed and perhaps another 64GB for 128GB total. ;-)

Pros: To correct the last comment: This controller DOES support booting. You have to update to the latest firmware (keep in mind there are multiple versions of 1.45....80915 is the latest). I have booted off multiple drives and multiple array types. Each firmware update improves behavior and performance and makes more drives compatible.

Cons: SATA STR is lower than what many people will expect due to SAS overhead.

Overall Review: Strength of this controller is in random access patterns and improved parity calculation efficiency.