Joined on 06/09/03
A fine little pc
Pros: I've got one of these and it's pretty great! I used to have a full-fledged media PC with 12 hard drives running in the living room, the heat and noise were fairly unpleasant. I've since moved the DVR down to the basement and set up one of these as a media pc! It's the size of a Wii (two dvd cases), it has a tiny fan that so far only runs during boot up. It can run 1080p video over the web or shared files over the network and can even run Winamp's Milkdrop visualizer at 1080p at 30-60fps (with just a few graphic intensive presets dropping it to 5 fps). Not bad for such a tiny pc! All I had to do was pry open the top, slide in an SSD and some RAM, and install windows through a USB cd drive.
Cons: With a dual-core 1.6ghz, this is no speed demon. When I was using a quad-core media center running at 3ghz, a web browser could load in a fraction of a second. On this machine you have to wait a few seconds to load some things, but for the decrease in noise and power bills, I can tolerate it. Take care though, the front USB ports are USB 3.0, and the Win7 DVD has no drivers for them, so you need to install by connecting the optical drive to a USB 2.0 port in the back.
Overall Review: Some notes: Foxconn makes intel and AMD versions of this product, the intel one has some serious problems, including NO support for Windows 7 64-bit. However this one is the AMD version, and it works fine for me under Windows 7 64-bit. Also, be sure to get the latest drivers from the Foxconn website, I was noticing some video lagging over the NIC, but installing the latest NIC driver corrected it.
Broke twice, can't recover data
Pros: Easy to use. The RAID-1 system means each drive is mountable, which is useful when the enclosure box breaks.
Cons: Reports HDD2 broken when HDD2 is just fine, refuses to mount when one hard drive is dead. You cannot recover your data, doing so voids your warranty. Breakage: I've had this product less than a year, and it's broken twice. The first unit only had one tamper seal sticker on it, so I was able to open the other side, get my data, and return it for a replacement. The replacement unit has two tamper seals, so I cannot recover my data without voiding my warranty. It's strange, both times it's broken the unit has reported HDD2 failed and refused to mount, but when I extract the hard drives, they are both totally fine. The unit itself is highly prone to breaking, and with their tamper seal protection, when you open the unit to recover your data you void your warranty. I haven't lost any data, so the RAID-1 functionality is fine, but the reliability and warranty issues make this a product worth avoiding.
Overall Review: Opening the unit to get data off your hard drives (when the unit breaks) voids your warranty. If you want to get a replacement for a broken unit, you must either pay a data recovery company to extract it (and send it back with paperwork documenting why the seal was broken) or lose your data and send it back without opening it. What a lame policy!
A fine fanless PC
Pros: This system has a small form factor, is completely silent, and decently powered. It can handle videos through Kodi without any delay (it's just as fast playing video and skipping forward as my 4ghz gaming pc!)
Cons: The 2.5" HD installation is messy to the point of impossibility. There just isn't enough room. The SATA cables need to somehow sneak behind the RAM slots, but they are neither long enough, nor flexible enough. I ended up going with mSATA, and would recommend it. Biggest con that I saw: There are no USB 2.0 ports, all USB 3.0 This made Windows 7 installation impossible for me because the installation media contains no USB 3.0 drivers. I tried loading the drivers onto a Windows 7 ISO (on a thumb drive) with the DISM commands, and it failed (no mouse and keyboard). I tried using the ASRock tool to patch the ISO and burn a disk with the USB 3.0 drivers, that failed in the same way. I tried using a recent version of Ubuntu, and that failed to boot entirely. Eventually I gave up and tried Windows 10, and it installed just fine. I guess make sure that the OS you want to install supports the hardware, or get ready to become an expert in customizing that OS.
Overall Review: I picked this up to replace a Foxconn NT-A3800 AMD system I was using as a HTPC, and it's worlds better. High bitrate videos (~10gb) that chugged on the Foxconn run perfectly smoothly on the Beebox N3000. When I finally shut down the old system, and heard all the fans in the living room stop, it was music to my ears. The OS install was tricky until I switched to Windows 10, and after that it was a breeze. The system is decently fast, but no speed demon. Browsers take a few seconds to open up, and there's some delay when switching tabs or launching new programs, but I'm fine with that. It's a tiny computer that can run a full version of Windows with no fans, and a very low power draw, so I'm more than happy! If you've got the RAM sitting around, and an mSATA card, I'd highly recommend this computer!
In favor of convection
Pros: Will cook frozen burgers, steaks, or chicken and cook them well within 15 minutes. No defrosting! You can put frozen french fries in there and it cooks them with the oil inside the fry from the inside out. No need to add grease, in fact after making the crispy fries, the grease comes out of them! (making it even healthier? :-) For re-heating foods, it completely beats out a microwave. No sogginess, the heat makes everything crispy and gives it a little browning.
Cons: The self-cleaning basically swirls soapy water around the thing. It's still necessary to do a bit of cleaning. Makes a loud noise and an unearthly (1300 watt) glow, but I think that's kind of cool.
Overall Review: I've got a similar product advertised by mr. t, I paid more than $200 for for it, and this looks to be the same exact thing. I'd recommend it!
Two of these Broke
Pros: -Many connection options
Cons: -Failure Rate. I have had two of these over the past two years, and they both have failed after about a year of use. One emits a high-pitched whirring when turned on and wouldn't mount, but when I put the hard drive in another dock it worked fine. The other had a broken power adapter, the light on the brick illuminated when plugged into the wall, but turned off when I connected it to the hard drive.
Overall Review: I contacted Rosewill support, I told them I knew that I was out of warranty but would like to buy a replacement power adapter. They responded saying that I was out of warranty, so they must not have read my email. Four or five annoying emails later, they told me I cannot buy a replacement power adapter if I'm out of warranty. Bummer! I've been using about 12 hard drives in 6 different enclosures over the last 5 years. I have had NO hard drives fail, and NO other enclosures fail, but two of these have broken. I'd recommend avoiding.