Overall Review: I used the Ryzen 5 9600X as part of a media system. No gaming involved. Nice budget priced CPU with plenty of features for this task. Put it in a Gigabyte X870I ITX motherboard and used 32GB of G.Skill memory. Plenty fast and it run quiet and cool.

Pros: I have the 1TB and 2TB versions. They are not a bad deal, they are quiet and seem to run well enough if the application can deal with them. I ended up putting these in Roswell SATA -> USB external enclosures where they worked just fine and will end up using them for archive and portable temp space.

Cons: My OS of choice did not like either the 1TB or 2TB versions of this drive. Something in the firmware causes trouble when the devices are probed, either they are taking a very long time for the sata BSY signal to clear after a device reset, or it never clears at all. The end result is that in one of my systems that I tried to use these in, the devices were never probed or seen by the OS. I didn't want to muck with the source to try and increase the wait time on the probe as no other drives I have exhibit this behavior.

Overall Review: There are certainly applications for these. The 1TB drive, in particular, is quite small for a 3.5 inch and may fit in places where others will not.

Pros: Nice small ITX motherboard with decent features.

Cons: Strange behavior when trying to use CSM mode. No video on the HDMI port.

Overall Review: Needed a new media system to play videos and etc on. What I usually do in that case is find a set of components that are about a year old that had reasonable ratings and build up a quiet running system around the components. Not gaming here at all. This motherboard fit the bill pretty well. I used a reasonably priced Ryzen 5 9600X and put 32GB of memory in it. I used a smaller ITX case that just barely fit the water cooler that came with the motherboard as an extra. The general effect is a pretty powerful media system that runs most of the time very cool and quiet with the only fans being the ones that came with the water cooler. Pretty happy with it so far. The only really odd thing I found was that when trying to use the CSM Legacy BIOS mode there was no video on the HDMI port at all. Not even from the BIOS. I was migrating a Windows 10 SSD to the new system that had not been converted to GPT/UEFI yet and needed CSM for a short time until that conversion could be done. This ended up working out ok, as I could get into the system remotely, but I did panic for a short time thinking that the motherboard had gone bad. There does not appear to be any mention in the manual of this behavior. I also got quite familiar with the CMOS reset as that was about the only way to get the firmware back into a usable state.

Pros: The older HGST drives are pretty nice, even when refurbished. I got two this time around, one was in service at least a year and the other around two years from SMART self test logs that were present on the device.. Both drives had their SMART data otherwise scrubbed, which is typical for a refurb'ed drive. The drives arrived well packed and in could-not-tell-the-difference-from-new physical condition.

Cons: Well... the offer was for refurbished HUA723020ALA641 drives but what I received was HUA723020ALA640 .. now these are very NEARLY identical devices, but since I was very interested in replacing like-for-like in a raid configuration I was trying hard to get exactly the same model. Thankfully, the devices are close enough in this case that they have the same number of sectors so there ended up not being any problem.

Overall Review: The devices will likely be fine, just wished that the offer was more accurate. I have used goHardDrive in the past and will continue to use them in the future.