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Alex M.

Alex M.

Joined on 07/14/03

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 8
Most Favorable Review

Great product for a media server!

Sans Digital 4 Bay eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD Tower Storage Enclosure (no eSATA Card bundle) TR4M+BNC
Sans Digital 4 Bay eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD Tower Storage Enclosure (no eSATA Card bundle) TR4M+BNC

Pros: -HIGHLY expandable. I started with one of these on a RocketRaid 622, and am now running 4 of these on a RocketRaid 2314. I simply expanded my existing arrays to include all 16 2TB drives. -Great throughput - my 16 Hitachi 5400RPM HDDs can consistently read and write at 150MBps, can't complain about that! -I have had 2 of these units running 24/7 for about a year and a half the other 2 running 24/7 for about 6 months. No reboots, even to expand the volumes. -No rebuilt required when switching from RR622 and RR2314!

Cons: -LED Fans? What a poor choice in an otherwise professional looking product. I have the 4 of these in a 4 post server rack; the blue aura is a little ridiculous. Some people may enjoy this if they havent outgrown their clear side panel case phase. -Screwless drive cages would be nice, but honestly I have only removed a drive once so its no big deal. -Stupid high hard drive prices, I really hope those come back down soon!

Overall Review: Make sure to select the largest sector size to allow for large volumes!

<--- BLOWN AWAY IMPRESSED

Fractal Design Define R4 Black Window Silent ATX Midtower Computer Case
Fractal Design Define R4 Black Window Silent ATX Midtower Computer Case

Pros: -Fits an H100 up top and/or in the front (if removeable drive cages are removed) with no modification! -Sound Deadening material rocks! Drastic improvement over my Lian Li A05B with double the 120mm fans. -Mount SSDs behind the mobo tray? AWESOME Idea! Innovative thinking. -Loads of fan mounts, filters over all intake fans (Including PSU fan) = easy cleaning! -Compact and light compared to similar cases -Well thought out cable management options -*Feels* quality. Sound deadening material gives the case and panels a solid feel. Painted interior w/ rounded edges is always a plus! -Blanks for unused fan slots = a great idea for anyone building a quiet or silent PC! -No stock LED fans - I don't do the gawdy thing, the clear side panel was a stretch for me but I wanted the fan controller/pump of the H100 to be visible from the outside so I went for it :P -Plenty of room left behind the motherboard tray = more room for cable management

Cons: -The Front Panel HD Audio connector BARELY reaches the connector on my motherboard. An inch or two to spare on that would be nice! -Front fan filter removal panel is made of cheap plastic, feels like it wouldn't stand up to a frustrated user going all Hulk on it! -I love aluminum. Obviously I can't hold this against it, but it sure is nice to save a little weight since this computer goes to LANs often enough to make it a pain!

Overall Review: -H100 may not fit up top for all motherboards. Myself I have an ASRock Extreme3 Gen3 and was able to fit the H100 without any issue. I was also able to fit 2x Antec Kuhler 620 radiators in the front of the case (1 for each video card). - I mounted a 300GB Velociraptor and a 64 GB SSD on the back of the mobo tray. Looks very clean to have no storage visible!

Works with Backtrack, awesome

Rosewill RNX-MiniN1 (RWLD-110001) Wireless-N 2.0 Dongle (1T1R) IEEE 802.11b/g/n, USB2.0 Up to 150Mbps Data Rates, WEP 64/128, WPA/WPA2, and IEEE 802.1x
Rosewill RNX-MiniN1 (RWLD-110001) Wireless-N 2.0 Dongle (1T1R) IEEE 802.11b/g/n, USB2.0 Up to 150Mbps Data Rates, WEP 64/128, WPA/WPA2, and IEEE 802.1x

Pros: -Works with 0 configuration in Windows 7 (x86 and x64), Ubuntu, and Backtrack 5 -Can enter monitor / promiscous mode without issue -Supports Packet Injection -Sits close enough to flush in my laptop USB port that it can live in there. -Works great for attaching to a Backtrack VM while leaving existing wireless unaffected

Cons: -Limited range? Expected this since it was so small though with no exposed antena None yet!

Overall Review: I have yet to use this for anything other then pentesting, so I can not speak for its use as a day to day wireless card.

Excellent card for an ever expanding array

HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 PCI-Express x4 SATA II (3.0Gb/s) RAID Controller Card
HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 PCI-Express x4 SATA II (3.0Gb/s) RAID Controller Card

Pros: This is an outstanding card for a number of reasons: 1) DIRECT Compatibility with arrays created with the RR622 series cards (Which are included with many Sans Digital enclosures). Literally just unplugged the eSATA cables from my old server (RR622) and attached the enclosures to the new one (RR2314). Stoked! 2) OCE (Online Capacity Expansion) - I cant stress enough how important this is to me. While it may take a day or more to complete with larger arrays, OCE allows me to add drives to my existing arrays without even having to reboot the PC! Start with a TR4M-BP, an RR622, and 3x2TB Hitachi drives, then add more as you need space till you have 4xTR4Ms, this card (RR2314), and 16x2TB drives! Great for someone who cant afford it all at once. 3) Support is awesome, both Sans Digital and HighPoint have had great input. 4) Speed. Both my arrays are slow discs (5400 RPM Seagates and Hitachis), but with 6 drives in each array I am getting reads and writes consistently over 100 MBps

Cons: Well, the price could be lower.

Overall Review: I know they don't endorse non-raid edition HDDs, but I haven't had a single failure using Seagate 1.5tb 5400Rpm drives and Hitachi 2TB consumer drives. Works just fine for a home NAS setup, and if one does fail they're cheap to replace.

10/26/2011

Bang per buck - amazing

Hitachi GST Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 (0F12117) 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
Hitachi GST Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 (0F12117) 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Excellent Hard drives. Using 4 in a Sans-Digital TR4M-BP external enclosure behind a RocketRaid 622 controller in RAID5 (6TB Volume!). 0 Bad sectors on any of the 4 drives, all worked out of the box. Couldn't be happier (I guess I might be happier when my rebates are actually processed and returned, still waiting!). These drives run a full 10 degress cooler UNDER FULL LOAD FOR 30 HOURS then my other RAID5 of 4 Seagate 1.5TB drives do idle! Pretty impressive.

Cons: No Eggs off because I know this going into it, but these drives are definitely NOT quick/responsive. These would make a bad OS/System Disk. Anyone using a 2TB 5400RPM drive as a system disk deserves a good firm slap to the face anyways though. Excellent for media/secondary storage/ data archiving. Also not a real con, but it took almost 40 hours to initialize the drives, create the array, format, and copy over 6TB of data. I guess thats just what you get with 6TB of videos.

Overall Review: Real pumped on these drives, I will be buying Hitachi again in the future :)

Impressive

Western Digital WD TV Live Plus HD Media Player
Western Digital WD TV Live Plus HD Media Player

Pros: -Amazing Device, can play virtually any video format I've thrown at it, as well as audio. Plays 25 gig 1080p Blu-ray rips fine AS LONG AS ITS OVER CAT5 -Frequent Firmware updates is DEFINITELY a plus, as issues are frequently being resolved. -Facebook, Netflix, Youtube, Pandora - all HUGE plusses IMO -When configured properly, Interface can be somewhat intuitive - play around with the settings.

Cons: -FAST FORWARD Blows, no "skip forward" functionality. Normally it will detect where the video stopped for a resume. -Still has glitches, scolling sucks for large media libraries (goes way to slow then waaay to fast) -Very "moody" streaming over wireless or POE - I HIGHLY recommend pulling cat5 for it. I tried 4 different wireless adapters, upgraded my wireless router, then finally got it to work properly for $56 purchasing 1000' of cat5e. If you intend to watch HD content (720 or 1080), cat5 is a must. Over Wifi, sometimes it wil stream an entire HD movie without a hiccup, but 7/10 times it would choke at sometime and require rebooting to resume playback. Very annoying.

Overall Review: I have owned 2 of these, and can safely say this is an incredible little device for the money, but if you are serious about your streaming you'll be better off with a zbox / htpc / popcornhour. All in all, excellent device, and well worth every penny.