Pros: These are great drives for a storage array of any type. Don't expect speed, expect lots of storage space. For the price you can't beat them, ordered 3, none DOA, just copied about 5TB of data to them in a RAID 5, no issues, no errors, expected write speeds and read speeds.

Cons: None as of yet, in fact I plan on buying more. Only Time will tell how these hold up, but so far so good.

Other Thoughts: Using these with an LSI Megaraid card and they work great in a RAID 5 config. Slowly phasing out my 5X 2TB RAID 5 and swapping in 6TB drives. I took a chance on these being a No Name branding White label product, first time for me, but so far these have lived up to their word. I did some read up on the firmware and drive design along with the board design, many have said these are WD RED clones, I actually have a WD Red 6TB in another machine where the specs are nearly identical to this drive and that drive has been running for nearly a year as a boot and storage drive without issues for a HTPC. The firmware on these drives is an exact match to that RED drive, not to mention the design is a very close match for both the construction of both drives in mounting points and board design, so I think it's safe to say these are more than likely clones/refurbs of the WD RED 6TB 5K RPM drives. I will update in one month on how they are holding up, I do not plan to order more till these have been properly burned in for a month. They are primarily used to hold Media Data(Movies/Music) and stream said HD content to HTPC's throughout the house. So far in my testing, not one single issue or error even after doing a full initialization and then copying 5.5TB worth of data over to them in one single process. Not one single hiccup during the entire process.


Update** 8/2/2016 Bought two more of these and added them to my RAID 5, No DOA and all 5 drives reconstructed the entire RAID without any errors. These drives are solid by me so far. The first 3 are solid and the new 2 I added on to the same RAID 5 array are good to go.

Pros: Great Raid card. This is not a high performance card, so if your expecting high perf and don't get it, don't complain, buy the card with 512MB of cache if you want high perf. This card is a great on board raid replacement. On board raids are not reliable majority of the time and are not true RAID but Virtual RAID. If you looking for something to take it's place and plan on running RAID 5 for Data storage, this card is great. I have it hooked up to 5 Samsung 2TB 7200 RPM drives and it has been rock solid for nearly 2 years. Write speeds average around 110/mbps going from my SSD to the RAID, this is what I would expect for a Raid card at this price range running RAID 5. I can't comment on SSD perf with this card as I have never done it, but I imagine with Average write speeds of 110/mbps with 7200RPM platter drives you can expect at least double that. Really happy I bought this card as it has never done me wrong in the 2 years I have owned it. The web driven UI is awesome and easy to manage. Setup was a breeze and I had no driver issues with Win 7 x64 or Win 8/8.1. I actually bought another one of these for my Hyper-v Host, Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, no issues there either, driver install was a breeze and raid setup/config was just as easy. If you looking for a Raid replacement for your poor virtual on board raid, this is the answer, buy it and be happy!

Cons: No Cache, but really this is not a con. This card was made for someone who wants true hardware RAID but does not need stellar performance.

Other Thoughts: Not sure what all the bad reviews are about regarding perf, if you wanted killer perf in RAID 5 you should have bought a far better card. On top of that the bad reviews about compatibility, common people, there is a reason LSI has a compatibility list they keep updated and they tell you to look at before buying the card, it's not their fault if you ignored it.