Pros: The trayless design is good and bad. Good because it's quick. Unpack the unit, unpack your drive, slide it in - no trays, no messing with screws, etc. Bad because sometimes drives don't quite seat properly. I run this box for two things - one, a media repository. Two, a backup location for a lot of servers. I netted 6TB out of 5x1.5TB drives in a RAID-5 setup under Linux. Takes the burden off of having to have internal slots in your case for drives... allows for hot-swapping if you have a failed disk or if you use it to interchange drives.

Cons: Well, this is no enterprise class machine. It's a *little* noisy... the fan has a slightly annoying vibration in it. I wouldn't want to sit in the same room with it all day long, it'd drive me a little batty.

Overall Review: I don't know what the other reviewer was talking about needing SATA cables. Maybe his was an open box? Mine had everything I needed except for the eSATA cable to go to my controller. NOT ANY OLD eSATA CARD WILL WORK WITH THIS! You *must* use a card that supports SATA port multipliers. I picked up item # N82E16816215155.

Pros: Works like a charm, OHCI compliant. Works great with (most) linux clients.

Cons: Can't handle heavy transfers. With external hdd's, got tons of errors on large transfers... switched to a higher quality card, no problems.

Overall Review: Not bad if you want to use for an IPod or maybe low-use camera, but I wouldn't suggest using it for any big transfers.

Pros: With a simple 1X PCI-E card running Ubuntu 9.04, 64-bit, I7 2.7GHz, hdparm tests give 5800 MB/sec cached reads, 66MB/sec buffered disk reads. Coping large data from an internal 3Ware (PCI-X) 6-drive RAID-10 array to this box saw around 67-70MB/sec transfer times. The chassis has 5x Samsung 1.5TB 5400 RPM drives, running RAID-5 under mdadm (software RAID-5). I can't complain about the price/performance of this box.

Cons: It's not 100MB/sec?

Pros: This thing is great. Although I was really hoping to find a 4x PCI-E card, this one fit the bill none-the-less. I use it with a 5-bay SATA external array ( item # N82E16816215093) and RAID-5 it under Linux (mdadm) filled with 1.5TB 5400 RPM drives. Decent transfer rates (Supermicro server with I7 under Ubuntu). I haven't had the chance to test both eSATA ports, and I'm not using the internal ones.

Cons: None really. I can't fault the card for not having a 4X lane.

Overall Review: Looking for a card to do SATA port multiplying with ? This is one of the few that supports it.

Pros: Easy setup, FAST, flexable. We use this for our Windows and Linux hosts, and for backups. I've pushed the max 100MB/sec with an 8-drive array.

Cons: Doesn't work with VMWare/ESX. Random I/O isn't great, but acceptable for SATA drives.

Overall Review: For around $10K for 16TB of storage, you can't beat this for low-end SAN - or even DAS if you need to go that route with it.

Pros: Nice overall case. General design in line with what I expect of a case. Nothing special, but very nice overall. It was for a client who wanted it to match the room... cool blue LED's, not too bright.

Cons: Hardware rail kits were a little on the cheap side. Some of the cabling that wasn't needed (1394 to front access) wasn't easily hidden, which is an issue (for me) when you have a clear side. Front panel ports are on the side of the face, which can be hard to get to depending on where you put the case.

Overall Review: If you like copper (note it's not really orange), this case is pretty nice. I didn't notice the paint to be 'cheap' like another review stated.