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Nathaniel B.

Nathaniel B.

Joined on 09/20/04

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 13
Most Favorable Review

WD Red Pro 3TB

WD Red Pro 3TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD3001FFSX
WD Red Pro 3TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD3001FFSX

Pros: Fast, quiet (for enterprise class drives), stays pretty cool under heavy load (42C) in our server rack-mount chassis with 12x of these running, price per TB

Cons: This is more of a con in general about hdd drives today. Drives are getting to the sizes that when one fails, it takes a LONG time to resync the arrays leaving data at risk during the resync. And yes I know anyone who is in data center IT has multiple copies of things in different computers and off-site, but those still don't help the whole "takes forever to restore / resync" issues of today's large drives/arrays.

Overall Review: Watch out for Shoprunner shipping!!! Sometimes you get what you pay for. The first set of drives we received looked directly like the box out of Ace Ventura's Pet Detective opening scene! If I could attach a picture of the box I would...the top was crashed down to about 1/2 height, 3 of the 4 sides were caved in...needless to say, NONE of the first set of drives was functional with every one of them exhibiting the classic buzz/click from a drive with a stuck head on a platter inside. 10 stars to Newegg for the free two-way shipping and issuing out replacement drives as soon as UPS had scanned the RMA tracking lable into their system to replace all of the drives that were obviously damaged in shipping with no fault on Newegg's part. The drives were individually bubble packed with additional bubble packs filling the space in the box which should have been more than enough if the box had been handled with even an ounce of care from the shipping company. We replaced 12x 2TB Seagate drives with these because in the past two years sense we bought the Seagate drives, 2 have failed and 2 more have had issues where they randomly drop out of the array and cause the whole thing to enter degraded mode before the drives randomly show back up. The Seagates also seem to run a bit warm at 52~54C under load in our rack. We are using an Adaptec 7805H card for dual raid10 (4x drives per raid10), Intel Xeon E3-1246, 32GB Kingston ecc ram, Intel C226 based motherboard (providing the other 4x SATA ports for OS and VM drives) inside a Rosewill RSV-L4412 4U rack-mount chassis.

10/27/2014
Most Critical Review

Issues but beautiful when it worked

Dell S2418H Black 23.8" FHD 1080p Dell HDR (high dynamic range) AMD FreeSync Monitor, HDMI, VGA, D-Sub
Dell S2418H Black 23.8" FHD 1080p Dell HDR (high dynamic range) AMD FreeSync Monitor, HDMI, VGA, D-Sub

Pros: Beautiful screen when it worked and paired well with my Radeon RX 580 8GB + FreeSync.

Cons: The first one didn't work at all out of the box and the replacement lasted 1 year and 8 months before catastrophic failure (the magic smoke was released out of the monitor) while my son was playing a game.

Overall Review: You get what you pay for. I tried to cheap out and get a lower cost monitor with FreeSync and figured I couldn't go too wrong with Dell. Well, this particular model has power issues which may be why it is now discontinued.

11/26/2020

NOT ECC ram but decent desktop ram

Kingston FURY Beast 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4 3200MHz Quad Memory Kit KF432C16BBK4/32
Kingston FURY Beast 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4 3200MHz Quad Memory Kit KF432C16BBK4/32

Pros: It gets 3 stars instead of 1 because the ram does work at rated 3200mhz, cas16, arrived on time with acceptable packaging, and passed memtest. It would be 4 stars if I wanted desktop memory because I would have gone with a slightly cheaper 2x16gb kit and had room to add more later vs this 4x8gb kit.

Cons: Bought this for a micro server build and explicitly wanted ECC. The "specifications" and search filters on Newegg said it does, but these modules do NOT. I should have double checked with Kingston's site before placing the order as Kingston makes no mention of ECC for these modules. The seller and/or Newegg need to correct the specifications and filter so this does NOT show up under ECC - Yes.

Overall Review: I kept this and upgraded my son's PC as returning things around the holidays is horrible, return cost would make up the difference in price from this kit and the 2x16gb kits, and anything bought at this point has slim chance of making it by the time I need it. I went with a Nemix ram kit now for the server which arrived with Micron ECC 3200 chips and has now passed 48h burn-in/memtest and prime95 memory load tests. Some people have had issues with Nemix, but time will tell. The Nemix 8x 32gb ddr3-1866mhz ecc rdimms (Samsung chips) I bought last year are still working perfectly in my VM server.

12/12/2021

Great Bluetooth Keyboard

Logitech Ultra-portable, Stand-alone Keyboard
Logitech Ultra-portable, Stand-alone Keyboard

Pros: Works as one would expect and has decent range for attaching to my tablet that is 20ft away and attached to my tv. So far the battery lasts about a week of about 2h use a day before needing to be recharged.

Cons: Would be 5 star if it had better magnets to hold it in place in my tablet case. As it is, it does not stay in place on its own so I added a velcro strip to it and the tablet case (a Cooper 10" case that had a magnetic keyboard that 1/3 of the keys stopped working on after a week but did stay in place).

Overall Review: I wish it had a touch pad or pointer stick so I didn't need a BT mouse as well, but I know that it didn't when I bought it. There are few combo keyboards + mouse options at 10" or less that work well. Not a con at this price and design, but it does flex a bit when typing unless it's in the tablet case or on a solid surface. There really is no way to prevent this without either making the keyboard in a metal case or increasing the thickness, both of which make it not too useful for tablets due to increase in weight and / or thickness.

good while it lasted

GIGABYTE Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 ATX Video Card GV-RX580GAMING-8GD
GIGABYTE Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 ATX Video Card GV-RX580GAMING-8GD

Pros: Amazing upgrade from a geforce 650 gtx. Space Engineers played smooth at max settings with a massive base and ships and playing Kerbal Space Program on max.

Cons: Day 36 i started smelling electrical burning coming from my tower so I shut it off. Using the snuff test, I found it was the GPU. Now system wont post bios with the RX 580 in and the gpu "FAN STOP" LED stays on but both fams are spinning. Computer works when I remove it and reinstall the 650 gtx.

Overall Review: Since its past 30d newegg RMA policy, its going back to Gigabyte.

You get what you pay for

6X Riser Card Adapter PCI-E 1x To 16x Extender USB3.0 Powered Cable Bitcoin 6PIN
6X Riser Card Adapter PCI-E 1x To 16x Extender USB3.0 Powered Cable Bitcoin 6PIN

Pros: 4/6 worked, at least after reflowing them.

Cons: 2/6 had parts that were not soldered down at all and were rolling around in the bag. Because of this, I ran the 4 "good" boards through my reflow machine to make sure those parts were on correctly. I may do the same to the 2 bad boards. I tested with some old junk radeon hd 2450's and a 4870 before trying to put a rx 580 in it.

Overall Review: You get what you pay for...These were discounted from $70 to $45 when i bought it and now I see they are down to sub $30. The reason is the poor workmanship from my experience. Attempting to return them is not worth the time or effort as it will cost you to send them back and then another 2-3 weeks for replacements to arrive. During that whole time you are not mining with them. Spend a bit more up front and get well rated risers.