Pros: The IronWolf series of Seagate drives are intended for NAS installations. Upon receiving the drive, I popped it into one of my hot swap bays and the drive powered right up. The drive has eight 1.75GB platters spinning at 7200 rpm giving you 14TB, which results in 12.7 TB of usable space. The good news: This drive is fast; very fast in the world of spinner drives, that is. Seagate rates the sustained transfer rate for this drive at 210 MB/s. In synthetic benchmarks (ATTO, HD Tach, DiskMark) I’m seeing 250-260 MB/s. A quick local transfer test of folder containing 12GB files results in a real-world transfer rate of 248 MB/s. All of this is much faster than gigabit speed in typical networks, which will limit you to about 112 MB/s. The drive runs cool and is very quiet. It may even be quieter than my 5400rpm NAS drives. Seagate is currently the capacity leader in the industry and has even upped the ante with the recently released 16TB drives. If you want >12TB storage per drive, Seagate is pretty much the one choice right now… but it’s a good choice.

Cons: I did have some initial concerns with warranty on this drive. Seagate’s website has a warranty checker where you can enter your drive’s serial number and it will return the warranty end date. When I entered the serial number from my drive it came back as expired two months before I even received the drive. After some back and forth emails with Seagate support, it was finally revealed that the warranty was rescinded because the drive I received is a review unit. I’m not taking any eggs off for this. If that’s their policy then so be it. However, was given the impression in my correspondence with Seagate that the warranty clock may start ticking based on the manufacture date instead of the purchase date, although I cannot verify this. Regardless, I highly recommend all purchasers to verify the warranty using Seagate’s website if warranty term is important to you.

Overall Review: Seagate has several models of 14TB drives out there. In case it helps, here are the key differences between the 14TB models. BarraCuda Pro: General desktop storage, 300 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 1 million hours, 5 year warranty SkyHawk AI: Surveillance and CCTV storage, 550 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 1.5 million hours, 3 year warranty IronWolf: NAS, 180 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 1 million hours, 3 year warranty, up to 8 drives per enclosure IronWolf Pro: NAS, 550 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 1.2 million hours, 5 year warranty, up to 24 drives per enclosure Exos: Enterprise data-center storage, 550 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 2.5 million hours, 5 year warranty, up to 106 drives per enclosure

Pros: I already have a home server, so my perspective for the WD My Cloud Home is based on that. My home is a mix of desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Also, my home is wired gigabit, and everything I have to say is giving the WD My Cloud Home the best chance possible to shine. For the good, WD has made the setup very simple. It's clearly geared towards users that want to do everything on their mobile device. The setup instructions were clear and went as described. After installing the app on all mobile devices and desktops I was notified of a firmware update which I installed immediately. That's a good sign, I like when things take charge with keeping up to date. Another plus is the copy speed. On a desktop, the network share (which is only created if you have installed the WD Discovery software) can be used in a drag-and-drop fashion and I was seeing 50-70 MB/s transfer speed over gigabit ethernet. Not blazing fast, but not too bad. I already have a Plex server running on my home server, and I tried out the Plex integration on this network drive to compare. This cloud drive has a 1.4 GHz quad core RealTek processor and 1GB RAM. I had no issues streaming blu-ray quality mkv’s from the drive with some minor transcoding. It takes a little longer for videos to start playing than my home server, about 10 - 15 seconds, but there were no stutters or buffering after playback started. Integrated Plex that works is a quick and easy way to stream media and is a welcome addition.

Cons: Now the bad. It’s a very common complaint with this cloud drive and worth repeating here: you cannot access this drive at all if you do not have internet access, even if you have LAN available. The drive is accessed through software that requires one to login to a My Cloud account in order to mount the drive. You cannot map the drive manually, you cannot navigate using the IP address, you cannot plug the drive directly to a computer, and you cannot use the USB port (used to sync USB drives only) either. If your internet is spotty, then this network storage will be spotty as well. Minus one egg for this. The next nit to pick is the reliability of the mobile device sync. The app did successfully back up all photos on my mobile devices on initial set up. After snapping a few photos, I was happy to see the photos show up on the WD My Cloud Home Drive automatically. However, I noticed two devices several days afterwards that had new photos that were not appearing on the network drive. Even with the app running they did not sync. I had to disable auto-backup then re-enable to force the app to sync photos with the network drive. If the primary purpose of this drive is to seamlessly backup precious media like photos, then this is a critical failure. Keep an eye on what’s being backed up to make sure it is still working. Minus one egg for this. My final con is the folder sync speed on desktops over the network. To test the functionality, I set my digital music folder on my home server to sync with the My Cloud Home drive to create a backup. The folder has 534 GB of music files. While drag-and-drop results in acceptable speed, the speed when using the sync function is incredibly slow. How slow? It took over 2 days to sync all 534 GB. No eggs lost for this since it did successfully grab all data, but wow that is slow.

Overall Review: The WD Discovery software on the desktop is quite misleading. It has all sorts of links for companion WD software for backup, security, or other utilities but they don’t work for this drive. The “WD Utilities” and “WD Security” apps, for example, cannot see this network drive. The “WD Backup” also cannot see the drive and only has Dropbox as a backup option. There doesn’t seem to be a way to monitor drive S.M.A.R.T. data, health status, or to securely wipe this drive using any of the utilities. How do you set up folder sync on a desktop? When the WD Discovery app is installed and running, an option is added to the Windows shell and when you right-click on a folder it has “Sync to My Cloud”. The sync is one way, meaning if you delete a file on your computer it is also deleted on the network drive, but if you delete on the network drive it remains on your computer. If you choose to use the My Cloud Home web browser interface instead of installing the WD Discovery software, you are limited to 5 GB file sizes. This is probably a good thing for those of us with limited internet data plans. Ideally, syncing should be done over LAN via drag-and-drop or folder sync.

Pros: I don't need gaming or other heavy lifting for a CPU. I just needed a cool, quiet, modern platform that will last me for a good number of years. I chose Intel over AMD as I find Intel's Quick Sync hardware capabilities to be better in my application for a media server. This CPU fit the bill. It's the cheapest option to get into a socket 1851 platform at this time with no budget oriented Ultra 3, Pentiums, or Celeron chips available. Having 10 cores available is nice to have, but a bit overkill for my application. I am pleased with the CPU. It stays cool and quiet. The stock cooler has a copper core and is VERY quiet! It does everything I need.

Cons: The Ultra 5 225 gets a bad wrap in reviews because it doesn't have the gaming prowess of AMD and doesn't have the multi-core muscle of the 20+ core high-end Intel CPU options. This places this CPU in an odd place on price if those are your priorities. I would love to see a sub $100 option for socket 1851, but for now this is the point of entry.

Overall Review: Nothing to complain about here. I paired it up with an MSI PRO B850M-A motherboard and everything is working great. It does everything I need and is powerful enough I don't see a need to upgrade for a very long time.

Pros: Nice motherboard. No frills, no blingy RGB. Just what I needed to build a media server, paired up with an Intel Ultra 5 225. The build booted up first try, no problems with memory compatibility like other reviewers have reported. I'm using a Crucial Pro 2 × 16GB kit that ISN'T listed on the QVL, but it works great. Memory is Crucial part # CP2K16G64C32U5B (Newegg part $ N82E16820156450). I love the spring-loaded M.2 quick release pins. No need for a screwdriver or the pivot locking mechanism that MSI has on its other boards. Overall, I very pleased with the motherboard. It's reasonably priced and has a nice feature set. So far it's been rock solid stable being on 24/7.

Cons: The M.2 on the back of the board is only PCIe 4.0 x2, so be aware of that if you are using faster NVMe SSDs. You'll want to use one of the two other M.2 spaces on the front of the motherboard. The only thing that isn't quite right is the BIOS setting to power on after AC power loss. I have it enabled, but it doesn't seem to turn on the server after power is restored. Maybe a BIOS update will fix.

Overall Review: The motherboard arrived with BIOS vA50 installed. It booted up fine, but I did update to vA90 immediately after by using MFlash.

Pros: The Corsair FRAME 4000D RS is a big case. Its comical that it is classified as a mid tower ATX case. It can handle EATX motherboards easily. For graphics cards, I cant imagine a card that wont fit in the cavernous interior. The case has a built in GPU support too, but my graphics card, an RTX 4080 Super, was too short to make use of the support without relocating it. I opted to just use the support that can with my card instead, but the option is nice. Speaking of graphics card options, this case allows you to rotate the back card slot panel by 90° so you can vertical mount your graphics card. Unfortunately, Corsair offers the required PCIe riser cable separately, so plan for that if you want to vertical mount your GPU. There are some very innovative engineering going on here that Ive never seen before. First, nearly every part of the case is removable. This can be cumbersome as you build since you will have an increased number of screws to keep track of as you disassemble the case panels and parts, but it is a worthwhile tradeoff to make building easier. This case is optimally designed to sit on a desktop, not at floor level, with all front I/O ports and power button on the very bottom of the case. With the clear side window, its nice to be able to hide all of the cables very easily with the modular design that allows tucking everything away. This is a case meant to be on display. A first for me, this case comes with a standardized front panel pin plug instead of individual wires for power button and LED. I have been waiting for something like this for decades. No more hunting down the user manual for pinout diagrams. Corsair does include an adapter to use individual wires in the off chance your motherboard pins do not match the plug pinout, but it worked fine for my MSI X670E Tomahawk.

Cons: For the price, the case offers a lot and any negatives can be overlooked. The only negative that really comes to mind is the front panel wiring. Corsair has gone so low with the power button, USB and audio ports, that they had to wire them outside the case and loop them back in. This wiring harness pokes out of the bottom and can be visible when the case is sitting near eye level like this case seems to be designed for. See my photos with the red arrows. For such a massive case, it seems it could have been designed to hide the front panel wiring better.

Overall Review: Not much else is left to be said. The case is of good build quality with no metal burrs or sharp edges. Everything lined up properly and it looks good. There are many, many options for mounting fans, all-in-one radiators, and other hardware. The bundled fans are quiet and the case has no problems with airflow. For the price, it is a smart buy if you have the room for such a big case.

Pros: The Crucial T500 Gen4 NVMe 2TB SSD is definitely one of the faster drives out there, unless you jump up to Gen5 models and want to pay that premium. First of all, its one of the drives that comes with dedicated DRAM on boardthe 2TB model comes with 2GB LPDDR4and plays a Crucial role in boosting performance (see what I did there?) by offering increased cache speeds. This drive uses the fairly new Phison E25 controller with Micron TLC 3D NAND flash memory. With that said, the benchmarks support the specs. The drive's Read/Write is rated at 7400/7000 MBps. In CrystalDiskMark I measured 7421/7004 MBps, slightly exceeding the advertised speeds although ATTO topped out at around 6810/6480 MBps. It does get over 60 °C during heavy loads, but thats not too bad considering the 2TB model I received is the one without the large heatsink. Crucial does offer free Acronis disk imaging software on their website to help transition this drive into an existing installation. They also offer software to check the drive and update firmware, of which there was an update available when I received this drive.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: The price is right. The performance is right. The brand is reputable and stands behind their products. I see no reason to not get this drive if its in your price range. It easily surpasses Crucials P5 Plus models that were the top model before this.