Pros: The pros are that this works and seems to be very reliable based on the many times I've used it to move a "computer" from one piece of hardware to another for HW upgrades, restore from broken hard drive etc. There are plenty of new ways to do backups using the same services of the OS that Home server uses. The real benefit is that it "just happens" so that your household or small office can have backups without having to worry.

Cons: If only Microsoft actually understood the consumer marketplace, but clearly they don't have any expertise or drive there any longer.

Overall Review: The best way to use this version of home server is to actually build a Linux box with ZFS pools for your disks. Then, install home server as a virtual machine. I like to use VirtualBox since it runs in so many different places and I can take VMs between machines that way to run it where ever I need to. With ZFS, you get zfs-scrub to maintain the integrity of your disks, as well as the ability to add more space as new "virtual drives" of what ever size you have available, instead of having to grow with the required increments of physical raid systems. I use mirrored drives on ZFS for my critical data, and then raidz2 it its just big stuff that I really like to not have to recreate.

Pros: I've used Transcend cards for years, and replace them regularly.

Cons: There is not a free card, anywhere, that works flawlessly.

Overall Review: I use a Mac for all of my photo and video work now, because of a couple of different reasons. First, I can get stuff done quickly and make DVD or CD media quick enough using iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD, which come with each and every Mac. Second, and this is the number one reason for me, the Mac supports the use of a "Disk Image" mechanism. I can plug a card into my Mac, open the Disk Utility, select that card, click on the New Image button, and create an "Image" of that disk, onto my hard drive. The file will be named whatever I type, .dmg. Later, I can double click this file, and the OS will "mount" it up, as if I had slid the original disk back into the computer. Presto, I can reprocess or do whatever I want with the original content. I can name these disk images with dates, times, names etc to make them easy to find in a directory where I store them. Second, you can also do this "imaging" as an ISO image which you could then burn to disk media.

Pros: The card seems to work fine for me. My old SIL-3114 SATA-I (150Mbs) cards are extremely slower than this card. I was able to plug the card in, leaving my old cards in, and then export the ZFS pool I had on the old cards, cable the drives to the new controller, do cfgadm -l, and then format showed the new names. I then did the import and was back up with the pool on the new controller

Cons: The card fit on my motherboard and case a little odd. It does work, but I was not sure why the card was "tilted" away from the case fastening point.