Pros: my sample size is too small to draw any valid conclusions, but 4 out of 5 in raid 6 survived a full initialization, 2.5 TB of data copied over, and 1 died during raid controller consistency check. sense key 6.29, which is a circuit board failure on the drive. after only a week, way too soon to tell anything about reliability with the remaining drives hard to beat the price and the hardware raid controller compatibility. drives seem to be fairly quiet, not any louder than any other desktop drives, and certainly quieter than 10 and 15k sas drives.

Cons: -1 of 5 died after a few days use -if any others fail under manufacturer warranty, hope the company buying hitachi's storage division will be good with the warranty handling. the uncertainty of this does concern me a bit

Overall Review: 8x hitachi 1tb drives still running strong in a raid 6 for 3 years now....hope these 2tb drives are as good

Pros: bought a second one of these-they're a good value when on sale cheap, but in no way worth the regular price

Cons: 1. northbridge insanely hot-65-75 C out of the box. read the reviews-and know you need to add a fan to the northbridge 2. foxxcon quality...sata connectors on the board are slightly out of spec for physical size, very difficult to get anything but the included cables to fit. both boards are like this 3. bios is average, slightly better than a prebuilt system from a big OEM, but not up to enthusiast level 4. good luck getting updates or drivers from foxxcon's site...network is always busy

Overall Review: sale price makes it a good deal, and it's been stable, but there are so many better options if you're looking at regular price

Pros: This bracket allowed me to add two 12TB, 3.5 inch drives and an SSD in the 2 empty 5.25 bays in my case. I was out of traditional HDD locations with 8 spinning drives and a few SSDs already. This bracket was a lifesaver. another review said included fan was a bit loud. I swapped for a supposedly quiet one, and found it was louder than the included fan. I don't think the included fan is loud.

Cons: wasn't free

Overall Review: buy it

Pros: was free as part of bundle with Ryzen 7 1700. couldn't pass for the price, even had a $20 rebate on top of being free. I bought 2 of the bundle, 2x16GB ram cost as much as the cpu and MB combo. using as esxi whitebox, and works well there prime 95 stable for 24 hours and memtestx86+ stable for 12, so at least for stability seems good

Cons: randomly fails to post after removing and restoring power. noticed during burn-in, shutdown, turn off power supply to move from power strip to UPS. powered back on, has power, appears to start post, but won't get far enough for video handoff (one of the final steps of traditional post). hit reset button, it will immediately complete post and then boot normally. very odd. doesn't seem like a cold start issue as you can recreate issue by cutting power just long enough to drain capacitors, then restore power and it behaves the same, even though all components are still warm, so shouldn't be a cold solder type issue. makes me think more of a UEFI firmware type issue. I updated to latest bios immediately after inital power on test (i think 5.x, latest posted on asrock site 12 march 2019), so I can't speak to this being an issue introduced with this bios or if it has existed in prior versions. but definitely makes it difficult to run as a headless esxi whitebox. If I had to pay for this board I'd really consider returning over this. If I was paying for a board I probably wouldn't have bought one this cheap, so keep price in mind for expectations.

Overall Review: seems to have way too many bios options, esp around overclocking. pretty sure most people buying to overclock aren't buying low-end boards like this. really looks like bios was inherited from a higher end model will little if any customization, which could explain the odd failure to post issues that seem like a uefi firmware bug

Pros: -technically it works -the two paired with each other automatically

Cons: -tested in multiple locations, highest average file transfer rate 11Mbs, wireless B can do that! copy is read from 8 drive raid 6 array on nas system to local system SSD, wired will saturate 1Gbs cat5e at 119Mbs on same setup. wireless N with all my other devices eating into bandwidth will easily sustain 30Mbs -gets rather warm

Overall Review: -hoped to use this to alleviate wireless bottleneck as I have way too many devices, but doesn't look like it will function as needed and nowhere near as advertised.

Pros: bought for a cheap home ESX whitebox, price was fair for a cheap box, planned to install used intel pro 1000 cards for esx, and maybe try side loading driver for what I assumed to be a cheap realtek onbaord nic. I missed in the specs, and was pleased to find the onbaord nic is an intel, so native esx driver support!

Cons: at this price and this feature set, hard to find any cons. I'm not overclocking or trying to do SLI. I have a quad port intel pro 1000 in the top (x16) pci-e slot (card is a x4) and a dual port pro 1000 nic in the bottom pci-e x4 slot, both working great. and esxi 6 has native support the intel sata controller, no need to side load unsupported driver to use internal sata drives for datastore devices