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James E.

James E.

Joined on 11/12/04

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 13
Most Favorable Review

Cheap for what you get.

WL 6TB 64MB Cache 5700RPM SATA III (6.0Gb/s) (Quiet & Heavy Duty) 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (For Destkop PC/Mac, NAS, CCTV DVR) -w/ 1 Year Warranty
WL 6TB 64MB Cache 5700RPM SATA III (6.0Gb/s) (Quiet & Heavy Duty) 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (For Destkop PC/Mac, NAS, CCTV DVR) -w/ 1 Year Warranty

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.

Overall Review: 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.

Most Critical Review

Completely Unreliable.. Don't waste your money..

OCZ Colossus LT Series 3.5" 1TB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD2-1CLSLT1T
OCZ Colossus LT Series 3.5" 1TB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD2-1CLSLT1T

Pros: When it works this drive is everything is should be, big and extremely fast. Rock Solid performance.

Cons: I have went through 3 of these drives so far. The first was DOA, Second lasted 30 days then dead, no Bios would detect it, 3rd drive same deal lasted about 30 days and died, no bios will detect it and if it does you get nothing but read errors. I'm going for a 4th, because of course at this point there is no going back and getting my money on this one, Stinks because I will just get another drive that will last me a month and then I'll be hitting OCZ up for another replacement. On a good note OCZ has been great about the RMA process so far. Quite Possibly the most unreliable piece of hardware I have ever bought. Fairly upsetting considering the price.... I will say this when the drive works, its all its cracked up to be and then some, but good luck getting it to last any longer then a month or 2....

Great Value on board Raid replacement.

LSI MegaRAID Internal  Low-Power SATA/SAS 9240-8i 6Gb/s PCI-Express 2.0 RAID Controller Card, Single--Avago Technologies
LSI MegaRAID Internal Low-Power SATA/SAS 9240-8i 6Gb/s PCI-Express 2.0 RAID Controller Card, Single--Avago Technologies

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.

Overall Review: 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.

Nice for the price

AZZA Solano 1000R Black / Red Japanese SECC Steel/Metal mesh in front MicroATX/ATX/Full ATX Computer Case
AZZA Solano 1000R Black / Red Japanese SECC Steel/Metal mesh in front MicroATX/ATX/Full ATX Computer Case

Pros: Sturdy construction, no sharp edges, I like the hard drive caddies, Plenty of room, Both side panels come off and this case has a hole where the CPU is to make swapping CPU heat sinks easy that require access under the board. I love the colors of the case and the great air flow it gets. I could care less about the blue power LED that everyone Cries about although I'm also not the type to boast about what my machine looks like on the outside, it's whats inside that you should be boasting about. The key things to look for in a good case are good construction, air flow, size, this case has all 3. As for the review below who quotes cable management, that's not the case's job, that's your job, Learn how to use Zip ties and clips/clamps. On a side note there are plenty of places in this case to run and hide cables including the extra space they give you behind the board. I was able to run majority of my cables behind it. All in all this is a good case for the price.

Cons: None really aside from the Hard drive caddies taking up a decent amount of room, if you have a fairly large video card and more then 6 hard drives you may need to do some finagling to get things to fit.

Overall Review: Good budget full size case with great air flow.

Expensive Price for a paper weight....

OCZ Colossus LT Series 3.5" 1TB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD2-1CLSLT1T
OCZ Colossus LT Series 3.5" 1TB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD2-1CLSLT1T

Pros: Huge size for an SSD. Fast As hell from what the Specs say.

Cons: Drive Was DOA. Kinda leaves a really bad taste in your mouth when you buy a SSD for this amount of money and it's dead when you get it.. Here's to hoping the replacement works.. ::Cross's Fingers::

Overall Review: This drive was going to be part of an aging VM Raid Array. Bought this one to start so we could test performance in our test lab. Not looking so good so far, makes you think if you receive them dead how long they are actually going to last when they work..

Terrible... Never Again...

ASRock P43DE LGA 775 Intel P43 ATX Intel Motherboard
ASRock P43DE LGA 775 Intel P43 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: None... DOA

Cons: This board was DOA.. No Post... Swapped all other parts I bought to build the system into another board and no problems.... First and last ASROCK Board I will ever buy...

Overall Review: Don't waste your money. Spend a few more bucks and get a board that actually works out of box... I should have known better after reading all the other DOA reviews...