Pros: Have used with Win7 and Memorex/Optical Quantum Media. Has burnt at 4x without any trouble (maximum speed of the media I have). Hooked this up via a SATA USB external enclosure and has had no trouble operating over USB 2.0. Also shows up as a BD-R in OS X 10.6.6 on my darwin boot. I'm crossing my fingers that this little guy will do as well as my Toshiba DVD-R 4x drive which I have used to burn over 400 discs since purchasing nearly 7 years ago. It was time for an upgrade and so far this drive appears to be holding its own.

Cons: So far nothing much--it is an OEM drive and came packaged only in bubble wrap (no cords or manual)--but that is as advertised so you can't really complain.

Pros: Drive was very affordable, operated excellently as part of my RAID array for about 2 years. I gave this drive a 5 star rating after purchasing it and not having an issue for a while--I have to rescind that now.

Cons: Just over two years to the day of purchasing one of these drives it had a catastrophic failure, no warning. I'm paranoid so I run a RAID 6, during rebuilt ANOTHER one of these drives failed as well. I've poked around google and seen that this is a recurring problem with these drives. I have SIX more of them in my RAID array, and now I'm faced with the prospect of having to replace them all in the very near future with WD Black drives at nearly twice the cost.

Overall Review: I'm never buying Seagate again. Drives fail, I understand that--but the large volume of people who have had failures right after their warranty expiration is very distressing. I have had WD drives fail in the past, but usually after 5+ years of use. I expect if a drive can make it 18 months that it should last at least five years.

Pros: When it worked, it worked great.

Cons: Died after 9 months. I had sporadic system crashes and two of my RAID hard drives died before this system crashed overnight and never came back on. The PSU made a clicking noise so I thought it was to blame, I swapped it out, same problem. ASUS did a cross-ship for me which was nice, but the new board was DOA. I've seen a lot of forum posts about this board frying components and now I legitimately am afraid my $1000 5960k has been fried, perhaps even my 32GB of RAM or my $1100 TITAN video card. Have been without a system now for 2+ weeks and to spend 3 hours putting the new mobo altogether only to have it immediately short out and shutdown is beyond frustrating. Oh, and their support staff just hung up on me twice without saying hello.

Overall Review: I've read there is a chipset used for OC'ing in this board that is not approved for use with intel processors. Can't believe this would be true on a $400 mobo marketed to high-end builders.

Pros: I can get sustained speeds of about 650-800MBps. I am a video editor and I'm running this with 8 3TB Seagate 7200rpm Barracuda drives. The drives cost me about as much as the card did. I'm in RAID 6 (18TB) and the speed is way better than I could have hoped for.

Cons: The processor on this card is running over 75C at stock. After a while I even saw it hitting above 80C. I've done some research and the concensus is that the thermal contact and the stock HSF are garbage. I've seen others with this card who have replaced the HSF and their temps under heavy load drop to the low 40s, and at idle they stick in the mid 30s. I am antsy about replacing the HSF because I don't want to void the warranty. However, it's borderline inexcusable to ship a product that runs this hot out of the box.

Overall Review: I've had this over a month now, so far so good. I've added additional 80mm fans next to the CPU without modding the card and I have my temperature now down to about 45C at idle. I believe it took a few days/weeks for the stock thermal compound to break in on the card.

Pros: When I am able to get it to boot to windows, it performs remarkably well in gaming. I have maxed out Fallout 3 at 1920x1200 and still pull over 50fps with all the options on high. I have yet to have it crash in-game. I'm running this card on a i7 920 @ stock 2.6GHz with 12GB of system ram.

Cons: Purchased this card with an EVGA X-58 SLI LE. I don't know if it's because EVGA is more of an nVidia company or if I received a defective card, but anytime I reboot my system this card fails it's power-up test and I get no video. Also, the box I received the card in was not shrink-wrapped, which isn't always the case with video cards anyhow, but I got the distinct impression upon opening up the packaging that someone had already returned this card once. There was a very tiny amount of dust on the heatsink of the card, so I was initially suspicious upon receiving it.

Overall Review: I'm giving it three golden eggs because it does work phenomenally well when I can get it to boot. It may just be that I unluckily received a defective card, but in case it may also be that this card does not play well with evga mobos. I'm planning to replace it with an nvidia upon my RMA refund.