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Todd M.

Todd M.

Joined on 09/17/05

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 14
Most Favorable Review

excellent

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Fast, quiet, cool, huge storage

Cons: I was using the tools from their website and I accidently set the capacity on one of my drives to the default... 137GB. Their software didn't provide any way to set it back to 750GB, I had to google and find a tool to do it.

Overall Review: I bought 3 of these for a 1.5TB RAID-5. They are working flawlessly. They are nice and quiet... I can't hear them over the fan in the backplane I got for them. There is a slight vibration from the 3 drives, but that is to be expected. They run very cool, at about 34C with all three of them spinning 24x7. I highly recommend these drives!

Most Critical Review

Not good

Athena Power AP-U1ATX30P8 20+4Pin 300W Single 1U IPC Server Power Supply - 80PLUS bronze
Athena Power AP-U1ATX30P8 20+4Pin 300W Single 1U IPC Server Power Supply - 80PLUS bronze

Pros: Quiet, efficient.

Cons: Lacks 8-pin 12V, unstable after a few months of use

Overall Review: I bought this power supply to replace a supermicro power supply in my 1U server. At first, it was great. Far quieter, while also being stable. A few months later, my server started hard rebooting randomly. Started out doing so every ~3 days, then eventually started hard rebooting like every 30 minutes. Much troubleshooting went into the root cause-- then I finally decided to put the old power supply back in (it was fine, just too noisy for home). After that, it's been rock-solid since. So, the root cause was the power supply. It must have degraded enough that it stopped providing stable enough power, or something (I don't have an o-scope to really back this up). I'm sure it didn't help that my motherboard needed an 8-pin 12V cable. This server doesn't draw too much power overall, though, so 4-pin 12V should be alright. It was at first, but eventually it couldn't. I'd recommend looking somewhere else for another 1U PSU... That's what I'm doing now.

12/30/2014

Awful

OCZ Agility 3 2.5" 60GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) AGT3-25SAT3-60G
OCZ Agility 3 2.5" 60GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) AGT3-25SAT3-60G

Pros: It is capable of storing bits. It has a low access latency.

Cons: Slow sequential, only 60GB,

Overall Review: I was talked in to buying this to get my foot in the door with SSDs. I'm definitely not impressed. I've been rolling with a 3xVelociraptor RAID-0 for years now, and it performs far better than this SSD. I was told SSDs would smoke my RAID-0, but I'm not seeing it. I got about 60-80MB sequential on this thing, and the overall benchmarks were not impressive at all. The software for flashing firmware also essentially doesn't work, so I was never able to try a new firmware to see if an update can make it impressive. I'll keep it around just because, but it's not a daily driver for me. I'll probably eventually put it in my mini itx pfsense router just to get some use out of it. Maybe it'll help improve performance with the squid cache because that's more random than sequential. I'm sure there are better SSDs out there, but this one did not impress me.

Good Card, fan sucks

EVGA GeForce GTS 450 (Fermi) 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Support Graphics Card 01G-P3-1450-TR
EVGA GeForce GTS 450 (Fermi) 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Support Graphics Card 01G-P3-1450-TR

Pros: Great performance, dynamic clocking (50 MHz when idle!), low power/heat at idle

Cons: The fan is garbage.

Overall Review: I've RMA'd this card twice (to EVGA) because the fan started grinding after ~3 weeks of usage on both of the cards. EVGA has been plenty helpful in this matter. But, I just got the third card back (actually a re-certified card, different s/n), so we'll see how it performs in a few weeks. But so far I've been pretty disappointed in the card as a whole just due to the fan. The fan was definitely the most noticeable noise in my whole system. I can't know for sure, but looking at some of the other brands fans... they all appear to be the same or similar. While waiting for the RMAs both times, I put in my trusty, old EVGA 9600 GSO-- the fan on that card has never been a problem.

I really should have spent more

ASUS VW266H Black 25.5" HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 1000:1 (ASCR 20000:1) Built in Speakers w/ component connector
ASUS VW266H Black 25.5" HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 1000:1 (ASCR 20000:1) Built in Speakers w/ component connector

Pros: Big, cheap, 1920x1200, 16:10 (not that 16:9 junk), lots of inputs, blue power LED

Cons: terrible color reproduction, blacks are awful, terrible viewing angles, poor and uneven backlighting

Overall Review: I got 2 of these for my system because they are so cheap for the size and pixels. So, I honestly didn't expect too much out of them to begin with being so cheap and not IPS panels. But I can honestly say I regret getting these as a budget purchase. I should have really spent more and gotten 2 IPS panels. The blacks are horrible, so dark scenes in shows/movies do not look good at all. The viewing angle is no good either. I actually have to tilt them a little bit downward to even allow the top of the screen to not look completely washed out. I'm most disappointed with these monitors when watching videos. Again, I didn't expect too much out of these when I bought 'em... I'm simply kicking myself for not being willing to spend more at the time. So, be warned that you may be disappointed with these. I'm not even a graphic artist or someone that really requires high-quality screens. I just multi-task a lot, school work, research, programming, media, etc.

Excellent

SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 ST2000DL004 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 ST2000DL004 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Low power, quiet, cool, lots of bits

Cons: not the fastest drives (obviously)

Overall Review: I got 3 of these earlier this year and put them in a linux software RAID-5 for data storage. They have been working flawlessly since. They are not the speediest drives, for obvious reasons, but they use a lot less power than the 3x750GB 7200RPM F2s they replaced. They also stay very cool in my backplane, so the fan is at a low speed. It takes 18-24 hours for the array to build/check. I got these when they were a "good deal"... but now they are an amazing deal. I might get another one or two to expand my RAID, use as a hot/cold spare, or move to a RAID6/RAID10 (since they say that 2TB drives are really too large to be practical in RAID5).