Pros: This is a message to Rich Z, who complains that he's not getting any more "speed" from a Sata III connection vs a Sata II connection. Although there are Sata III SSD drives that can outrun the bandwidth of a Sata II data channel, there isn't a conventional Rotating/Mechanical hard drive in the world that can do the same. Max theoretical bandwidth from a Sata II channel is 3Gbps - a little over 300MBps, but the fastest mechanical hard drive in the world isn't half that fast. So then, you may ask, why do manufacturers make Sata III hard drives? Because high-end HD controller cards use SAS to Sata fan-out cables that convert one SAS connection to 4 Sata connections. Under that scenario, 4 fast Sata II hard drives will experience a bottleneck. Hence, to get faster data transfers, you have to increase the bandwidth of the Sata channel. Thus, Sata III allows you to gang 4 drives together and still have excess bandwidth left over on the data channel.

Cons: none

Overall Review: You should really delete your review so as not to confuse other people who don't understand the difference between the "speed" of the data channel vs the "speed" of the device attached *to* the data channel.

Pros: Price

Cons: One year warranty means the company was losing too much money on warranty exchanges.

Overall Review: I build RAID6 systems for mid-size businesses. In the last 8 years, as disk capacity has grown from 250GB to 4TB, I've noticed a definite increase in failure rates from all manufacturers. I have some 8 year old 250GB, 320GB and 500GB drives that are still in service. But I've never had a 1TB or greater drive last more than 3 years, regardless of manufacturer. Also, about 25% of drives over 1TB seem to arrive DOA, and another 25% die within 6 months. My advice to anyone is as follows: 1) Never use a drive by itself. Use RAID1, RAID5 or RAID6. 2) Never put a drive into production until you've torture tested it by completely filling it with data, copying the data back to another drive (to ensure the data can reliably be read) and then repeating the write/read back/erase process at least twice more. Only then can you be sure the drive will pass the initial infant mortality phase. 3) If you use 8 or more drives in an array, RAID5 is not adequate. RAID6 is a must.

Pros: Great data transfer speeds. RAID 6 and RAID 60 for extra redundancy. Extremely reliable, especially compared to cards I've tried from other manufacturers.

Cons: Gets hot when doing multi-terabyte copies from one RAID array to another, but the card still performs reliably.

Overall Review: I own 3 of these cards. Currently, 2 cards are in one computer, and the 3rd card is in a second computer, but when Kaby Lake is released I'll build a 3rd computer and transfer one of the cards from the first machine to the new (3rd) machine. I'll also buy 10Gbit Ethernet cards to plug into PCIe x8 slots on the motherboards to facilitate rapid transfer of data. 1Gbit Ethernet just isn't fast enough for large data transfers. I bought 3 of these cards (not all at once) because I'm a big believer in maintaining multiple copies of ALL my data. In 30 years I've permanently lost data 3 times because I didn't have complete backups. I've finally learned my lesson. No matter how reliable your current/favorite brand of hard drives, eventually they DO fail. Note that RAID6 and RAID60 provide redundancy, but REDUNDANCY is NOT the same thing as a FULL BACKUP. The first card is running 24 3TB HGST NAS drives in a RAID 60 configuration (12 drives in each of two RAID 6 arrays that are then striped together for RAID 60). This yields 54.5TB of usable storage, with 4 drives for redundancy. The 2nd card currently has 20 4TB HGST NAS drives, in RAID 6. Later I will add 4 more drives, but reconfigure to RAID 60 for extra redundancy. The current configuration yields 65TB of usable storage, with 2 drives for redundancy. Since this array is essentially used to back up the first one, I think I'm pretty safe for now, but when I add 4 more drives, I'll switch to RAID60 to give even more redundancy. The 3rd card currently has 16 6TB HGST NAS drives in RAID 60 (8 drives per RAID 6 array, striped together). Eventually I will buy 8 more drives and re-configure the array into three RAID 6 arrays of 8 drives each, then stripe them together in RAID 60, thus allowing up to 6 drives to fail (2 per RAID6 stripe) without losing data. The current 16 drive configuration also yields 65TB of usable storage, so it's a perfect match to the storage array on the second card - the one with the 4TB drives. Of course, I keep at least one spare hard drive of each capacity on hand so I can instantly replace a failed drive. So far I haven't had any HGST NAS drives fail on me, but the oldest array (the one with the 3TB drives) is only 2 years old, so it will be interesting to see if all 24 drives survive the 3 year warranty period. We're well into the 2nd decade of the 21st Century, and its astounding to realize how much of our lives are stored in digital format. Not just business data, but personal records - tax returns, music, photos, home videos - it all adds up, and I would be devastated to lose ANY of it. It has taken 2+ years to get to the point where I feel like I have a fairly good data protection strategy in place. My next step after building the Kaby Lake computer will be to transfer one of the computers to another location so that I have protection against fire, flood or theft. I have a fast Verizon FiOS connection, and so does my brother, so it will be interesting to see if our 90 Megabit connections will provide adequate bandwidth. So long as I copy data on a regular basis, the day-to-day transfers shouldn't overwhelm our bandwidth. (Hopefully.) I've bought RAID Controller cards from other manufacturers in years past, starting with 8-drive RAID5/RAID50 cards, and eventually trading up to these 24-drive Areca cards as my storage requirements outgrew 8-drive solutions. I won't mention the other companies by name, but suffice to say that their controller cards failed at VERY inconvenient times (isn't that always the way?). I'm not saying that other companies don't have good 24-drive cards, but I'm not interested in experimenting. I'm satisfied with Areca and will stick with them.

Pros: Good price when they go on sale, which happens several times a year. Fast, quiet and reliable. 3 year warranty

Cons: None so far

Overall Review: I bought 16 of these drives over a two month period (January and February 2016). Put them into production on my newest file server in late February, after performing a low-level format and stress testing the drives to make sure I didn't have any weak ones that would die early. The drives are configured as RAID 60 (two sets of eight drives in RAID 6 striped together). This means any two drives in either RAID 6 stripe could fail and I still wouldn't lose my data. Theoretically, you could have a total of 4 failed drives (2 on each of the RAID 6 stripes) without losing data, but of course, in real life, you'd replace a failed drive immediately to regain the 2-drive redundancy. These disks have been running 24/7 since I put them into production and I haven't had any drives fail on me yet. I'm very happy with HGST NAS drives. I also have twenty 4TB HGST NAS drives on another file server and twenty-four 3TB HGST NAS drives on a 3rd older server. I've tried many brands over the last 20 years and have had successes and failures with all brands, but at the moment it seems that HGST NAS drives are the best. Keep in mind that REDUNDANCY is not the same as a BACKUP. That's why, over the years, I've gotten to the point where I have 3 files servers, one primary server and 2 backup servers. I don't EVER want to lose data again. It was bad enough in the 80's when you could lose a few Megabytes, and worse in the 90's when we started thinking in terms of Gigabytes. But we're well into the Terabyte age of Personal Storage. It's getting to the point where we can store (and lose) our entire lives if we don't get serious about protecting our data.

Pros: Controls up to 28 hard drives if you buy a cable for the external port. RAID6 is an absolute must these days.

Cons: Pricey, but then again, it's a niche market, not a mass market, so I guess cards like this will always be expensive.

Overall Review: This is my 3rd Areca card and I'm well pleased. I bought the first one (with 4GB on-board cache) almost 5 years ago, and it's given me such great service (still running in the original file-server computer) that I recently bought two more, although they were out of stock on the model with 4GB cache, so the new ones have just 2GB cache. As far as I can tell, this hasn't caused any slow-downs on data transfers. I put the 2nd controller in an empty slot on the original file server, and the computer recognized the 2nd controller with no conflict. I added sixteen 4TB HGST NAS drives to the new controller and set it up as RAID6. Then, a few weeks later I built a second RAID6 array using twelve 6TB HGST NAS drives. Soon I will put the 3rd controller card into a 2nd file server that I will build. At that time I'll probably transfer the twelve 6TB HGST drives to the new machine and use it strictly as a backup to the files on the first machine. That way I'll still have empty slots for more drives on the 2nd and 3rd controller cards for that inevitable time when I have to add more storage. The cards are expensive, and can take a bit of time to learn how to use all the functions - like the fact that a single array can be divided up into multiple volumes, which is probably important to commercial users, but I just use each array as a single huge volume for my media files. I see that Areca has recently introduced a new version of these cards with a different type of cable connector for the hard drives. There's probably a good reason why they changed the connector, but I decided to stick with this older model since I'm already familiar with it and have had good service. I recommend these cards to anyone who has outgrown 4 or 8-drive NAS boxes. And IMHO RAID6 is a must. RAID5 just doesn't give enough redundancy. The chance of a second drive failure occurring while rebuilding a data set increases with the amount of time it takes to rebuild an array. I started out 5 years ago with sixteen 1.5TB drives, and within a year added a dozen 3TB drives (28 drives on a single controller card, yay!). Now the new controllers are using 4TB and 6TB drives, and let me tell you, initializing an array or rebuilding an array after replacing a failed drive takes a LOT longer with these new larger drives. I hate to think how long it would take to rebuild an array using 8TB or 10TB drives. In any case, I feel a lot more confident now that I finally have all my files backed up to additional arrays. Remember that FAULT TOLERANCE (RAID 1, 5, or 6) is NOT the same as a BACKUP! Fault Tolerance is an absolute necessity to protect your data, because you can never tell when a drive will fail. But Fault Tolerance does not negate the need for a complete Backup.

Pros: Bought six of these for my newest Areca controller card. Works the way they are supposed to. No problems.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: They're actually a bit too long, but then again, half-meter cables would have been too short. If I could find these in 3/4 meter lengths I'd buy a few.

Placed an order on October 1st. It was an external battery to charge my phone. Shipment information says it was picked up from the seller on October 1st and arrived at FedEx that same day. The status changed to "In Transit" on October 2nd and has been stuck there ever since.