Joined on 06/29/12
Good Enclosure, Cheap Price
Pros: Lightweight, Aluminum instead of Plastic, USB 3.0, bus powered, includes USB 3.0 cable of adequate length.
Cons: none, I like it a lot.
Overall Review: This enclosure works very well. I installed a 750GB Hitachi SATA II 2.5" hard drive that I had lying around. Transfer speeds peaked at about 425MB/s and averaged about 100MB/s, compared to the roughly 25MB/s I get using a USB 2.0 port, it's a huge improvement. These speeds are also limited by the SATA II drive (3Gbps) and the speed of the ExpressCard bus (2.5Gbps max). I paired this up with a USB 3.0 ExpressCard adapter (54mm) for my Dell Latitude E5410 and it works great, allowing me to transfer large files or large groups of files to the USB 3.0 enclosure much more quickly.
Good Case for the price
Pros: Lots of room and relatively easy to have good cable management. Bottom mount power supply. Spring loaded door for optical drive. Spot for additional fan on side panel. Good price for including a power supply.
Cons: Posts used to connect front panel to case are very cheap. 2 of them broke off when I attempted to (carefully) remove it to install front intake fan and optical drive. Luckily this was easily remedied by using screws to attach top portion of front panel. Also, depending on the location of certain connectors, etc on your motherboard, you will only be able to fit shorter sized optical drives. In my case, the dvd drive barely fit, as it touched the 24pin power connector. I had to remove the door for the drive and just have the face of it showing.
Overall Review: Overall, a good case for the price. The cheap plastic was kinda expected at this price point, just be careful. So far, no complaints at all about the psu that is provided with the case and it's currently powering a Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 2.13Ghz, 2GB DDR2-667 RAM, 1x Seagate 500GB 7200rpm SATA hard drive, 1x DVD-RW drive, an ATI Radeon X1300/X1550 PCIe card, a PCI TV tuner card, and 3 fans (120mm front intake, 80mm side intake, and 90mm rear exhaust).
Works Well
Pros: This adapter is priced extremely well, and works perfectly.
Cons: None that I can think of. Comes in very generic packaging (literally a plastic bag), but what do you expect at this price?
Overall Review: I purchased this adapter for a client who wanted to connect their 2009 Macbook Pro to their HDTV set. There were other cables, etc available, but this adapter was chosen so a standard HDMI cable could be left connected to the TV, and this adapter moved with the laptop as necessary. It works well, the 2nd display was detected immediately when connected, and if your TV/monitor supports EDID, it will automatically choose and set the native resolution (1920 x 1080 in this case). Can't beat it for the price.
Great Entry Level Card
Pros: Low profile brackets included, quiet fan and cool running card, 128bit wide memory bus, plenty of output options.
Cons: none at this price point
Overall Review: I bought this for our home theater pc, which is a re-purposed HP DC5800 Small Form Factor business pc. I picked the machine up dirt cheap and upgraded the cpu to an Intel Core2 Quad Q8200 @ 2.33Ghz, 4GB 800Mhz DDR2 RAM, 80GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (for OS/apps), 2TB Western Digital Green drive (for media storage/backups), a handheld wireless airfly keyboard/mouse, and the Sapphire Radeon HD6570 1GB DDR3 graphics card. This machine sees 14 hours or so a day of use, ranging from Netflix/Hulu streaming, to HD movies/DVD's, to casual gaming (Sims 3, Skyrim, Super Street Fighter IV, and online flash games, etc). This card handles all those games at 1920x1080, medium to high settings, with extras like AA and AF turned off. Considering it costs only about $10 more than the HD6450, and provides roughly 3x the performance, it's a no-brainer for anyone looking for a low cost upgrade to provide better performance than integrated graphics.
Nice Quiet Full Sized Keyboard
Pros: These are great keyboard for the price, and awesome keyboards when they are on sale. I picked up a few of them when they were on sale for $4.99 a piece. I use one with the KVM switch in my shop, and normally keep a couple in stock for customers. The keys are pretty responsive, and they are very quiet compared to a number of other keyboards I've used in the past.
Cons: They're not free.
Solid Drive
Pros: 1TB capacity, 32MB Cache, overall the drive is pretty quiet, runs cool. SMART data for my "refurbished" hard drive only showed about 18 hours of time powered on, which I thought was awesome, sometimes you never know when you're buying something that's not new
Cons: SATA 3Gb/s. 6Gb/s would be nicer. However, considering that mechanical hard drives can't even saturate the SATA II 3Gbps link, I guess this really isn't a con.
Overall Review: I bought 2 of these when they were on special for $45 a piece, and feel like I got the deal of the year. I only wish I would have had about $500 extra when ordered them, or whatever the limit was per customer! Anyway, I'm sure it's an average drive at it's normal $99 price point, and there may be better drives out there, but at the time it fit exactly what I needed for about half of what I intended on spending