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 After some back and forth emails with Seagate support, it was finally revealed that the warranty was rescinded because the drive I received is a review unit.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: Although this NVMe SSD is heavily marketed as being intended for a PlayStation 5 upgrade on the packaging and product page, it works just fine in a PC which is how I used it. My review only reflects use with a modern PC. That being said, if you are purchasing for a PS5, the model with the heatsink is the one youll want in order to help keep things cool. While the heatsink is very large, it does not impede placement under an installed graphics card if your M.2 slot happens to be in that location. The drive with heatsink is about the same height as a PCIe slot. Even better, the heatsink really does keep heat under control. During synthetic benchmarking, the maximum temperature I observed was 58 °C. For performance, this SSD is equipped with 3D TLC NAND instead of arguably less-desirable QLC. Synthetic benchmarks reveal this drive slightly exceeds its 6600 MB/s rating for read and is on the mark for its 5000 MB/s rated write speed.

Cons: With the relatively large heatsink, you will need to forego any M.2 slots on your motherboard that make use of heatsinks. For aesthetic reasons, you may want to purchase the model without a heatsink if you want to maintain the look of your motherboard by using its M.2 heatsinks. The large heatsink might also be a concern if you plan to install in a laptop as an upgrade. This isnt the fastest Gen4 NVMe drive out there. The price is comparable to competing products that may be faster with our without a heatsink. A purchase likely depends on the deal of the day. While this SSD has the brand recognition of Crucial and quality to match the name, it comes in as a mediocre offering compared to other options for the price. Minus one egg for that.

Overall Review: Crucial offers a 5 year limited warranty on this NVMe SSD, however as of this writing the Newegg product page says its only a 3 year warranty. Neweggs information is not correct. 5 years from date of purchase is the term. My unit did not come with an M.2 screw, so hopefully you have one included with among your motherboard accessories or in your spare parts bin. And finally, Crucial offers free Acronis True Image cloning software to help you get started. You can download the software from their website.

Pros: This 1TB portable drive is very fast, as a solid state drive should be. However, you must be knowledgeable of what USB port you use (and cable- more on that later) or you may severely limit its performance. To illustrate the difference, I benchmarked using several different USB ports I have available. I do not have any of the newest USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (20Gbps) ports on my computer so I could not test the theoretical advertised max speed of 1600 MB/s for this drive. I do have USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (10Gbps), so my top-end numbers will likely be a little lower than the latest hardware. Here are the results from my benchmarks: USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) = 1044 MB/s read, 1009 MB/s write USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) = 457 MB/s read, 459 MB/s write USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) = 44 MB/s read, 43 MB/s write All of these USB ports were on the same computer, so this clearly illustrates you better know what generation of USB port you are plugging this drive into or you are leaving a lot of performance on the table. Now a word of warning about cables. In my early benchmark tests, I was using my own USB C to USB C cable I had lying around instead of the supplied cables. With my cable, even when plugged into a Gen 2 port, I was only seeing Gen 1 performance (about half). Be aware that your cable must be rated for the intended speed. As a final test, I loaded up the drive with about 700 MB of small files to check real world performance outside of synthetic benchmarks. File transfer rate was about 550 MB/s write using my fastest USB 3.2 Gen 2 port. It took about 45 minutes for the transfer to complete, which is much faster than any other portable USB drive Ive ever used. During the file transfer, I did notice one concern- temperature.

Cons: I have two cons to note. First, the cap that covers the USB C port on the drive needs more thought. The cap has a latch on one side and a pivot hinge on the other so when you pop the cap off it swings aside to give access to the port. However, theres no easy way to know which side is the latch and which side is the hinge. I could see someone snapping off the hinge when prying the wrong side up to open and then losing the cap. Second, this drive gets hot. In my file transfer test (see pictures) I monitored the drive temperature and it hit 80 °C, a rather high value for a storage device. To its credit, the drive never throttled and the outer casing never reached a point where it would scald skin, but it could be a cause for concern with respect to drive longevity if this drive sees heavy use.

Overall Review: Its a fast portable SSD. Corsair includes both USB C to USB C and USB A to USB C cables for maximum compatibility. The physical size was smaller than I expected- about the size of a large pack of gum. I knocked off one egg because there is room for improvement with the noted cons. Its a very capable and fast portable drive if you know how to use it and if it can hold up to the heat it generates. If you find the performance lower than expected, check the specifications of the USB port you are using, or the cable being used.

Pros: Ive used several different brands of powerline adapters in the past. None of them were really a good replacement for solid wireless and definitely not a replacement for true wired ethernet. All of them had spotty connections that would drop, or the throughput was miserably slow. With that said, the devolo Magic LAN powerline kit is the best Ive tried and is surprisingly good at what it does. Setup was very easy and once the adapters connected to one another I did not experience any dropouts. Through ping tests, I found the latency of this kit was the best Ive seen for powerline technology. Latency is better than wireless if that is what you need. And finally, I love that both adapters have an outlet pass-through and the satellite adapter has three gigabit ports. You can connect up to three wired devices without the need for an additional switch.

Cons: All is not perfect with any powerline kit, and this is no exception. First of all, it is advertised as having transmission speeds of 2000 Mbps. This is a bit misleading. The ports on this kit are full duplex gigabit, which means the connected link speed is 1000 Mbps and it can transmit and receive simultaneously. However, even connected at gigabit link speed the connection between the two powerline adapters is around 100-400 Mbps as reported by the devolo Cockpit software you can install to monitor the adapters. To illustrate the actual in-use speed of this powerline kit, I ran some network tests. Of course, individual electrical wiring will vary the performance on a case by case basis. A single large mkv file transfer going from local SSD to a RAID 5 server places the speed bottleneck on the network connection. I compared true wired gigabit ethernet, 802.11ax WiFi 6, and this powerline kit. File transfer results: Wired Gigabit = 113 MB/s (904 Mbps) WiFi 6 (same room as router) = 25.6 MB/s (204.8 Mbps) WiFi 6 (3 rooms away from router) = 9.4 MB/s (75.2 Mbps) Powerline (adapters on same electrical circuit, same room) = 7.22 MB/s (57.76 Mbps) Powerline (adapters used in separate rooms, separate circuits) = 5.59 MB/s (44.72 Mbps) The results above demonstrate that with a good signal, you might be better off using the latest wireless technology, although speed over wireless decreases drastically as you introduce distance and barriers such as walls. In a separate test, I attempted to play uncompressed blu-ray and 4K UHD mkv files using VLC player from my media server. The powerline setup was unwatchable due to losing frames which introduces a lot of skipping in the playback. With that out of the way, typical compressed video meant for streaming (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) works perfectly fine using these powerline adapters since those streams dont come anywhere near the bitrate or file sizes of uncompressed 4K UHD video.

Overall Review: Im giving this item five eggs for my review. As powerline adapter kits go, its the best Ive experienced and the best deserves full marks. As long as you know going in what it can or cannot do well, this is a very good product. What it does well: It adds reliable wired network wherever you need it, and its fast enough to stream video and audio without issues. What it does NOT do well: These powerline adapters are not meant for moving massive amounts of data over a network. For that you really need true hardwired methods and even modern wireless protocols would be better if your signal is strong.

Pros: Of course, I am using this PSU with the intended target, the Seasonic Q704 case. The power supply itself is par for the course for Seasonic. That is to say, it comes from one of the best quality PSU manufacturers on the market. Quality components, reliable power, outstanding warranty. I did some stress testing after installing all components using this PSU. My setup consists of a Coffee Lake i7 overclocked to 5GHz, RTX 3070, and many hard drives. While running FurMark and Prim95 simultaneously, I hit a max power draw of 525W measured on a kill-a-watt meter and there were no problems. Im confident the 650W rating is plenty for my situation under far less stress. The idea of this PSU is to make cable management easier and for that it definitely works. It places the modular cable hookups right where you need them. GPU power is next to the GPU. 24-pin power is right next to the 24-pin. So on and so forth. One thing I havent noticed mentioned before is that the PSU comes with a power supply tester. This is such a simple and appreciated little add on, I wish other makers would do the same. No more doing the paperclip test on power supplies. Im keeping that part in my build kit.

Cons: As a proprietary PSU format, the only negative is obvious. The PSU is not meant to be used with just any case. I do wonder if years from now when a PSU replacement is desired if these will be available for purchase. The Seasonic Q704 case can use any standard PSU, but unless you kept the cable management box which is removed to install this the SYNCRO PSU node, you will be left with a hole in the side of your case.

Overall Review: If you are building around the Seasonic Q704 case, then I do recommend this PSU. They really go well together like peanut butter and jelly and it really takes the modular PSU concept a step further. Ive never had an easier time with tidy cable management.