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Steven I.

Steven I.

Joined on 06/11/06

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 21
Most Favorable Review

Pretty Good

Optical Quantum 25GB 2X BD-RE 10 Packs Spindle Logo Top Disc Model OQBDRE02LT-10
Optical Quantum 25GB 2X BD-RE 10 Packs Spindle Logo Top Disc Model OQBDRE02LT-10

Pros: Have abusively written, erased, and appended a number of the disks, without any failures so far.

Cons: None.

Most Critical Review

Bad Temp Probe

Intel BOXD410PT Intel Atom D410 Intel NM10 Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU Combo
Intel BOXD410PT Intel Atom D410 Intel NM10 Mini ITX Motherboard / CPU Combo

Pros: Works well, and consumes ridiculously low power, like 20 watts. The big heat sink is solidly mounted, and covers the CPU and chipset. The sink has long, widely separated, blades. This is the great thing about this mobo.

Cons: The BIOS reads a CPU temp of 70C as soon as you turn the thing on. This must be a BIOS or temp probe bug, because the CPU is not nearly that hot. Perhaps they have Fahrenheit/Celsius crossed up? I've seen this temp-probe complaint in the D510 reviews, but not here on reviews of this D410.

Overall Review: If well-ventilated, it can be cooled passively due to the heat sink configuration.

4TB 5400rpm Red NAS

WD Red Plus 4TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s, CMR, 128MB Cache, 3.5 Inch - WD40EFZX
WD Red Plus 4TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s, CMR, 128MB Cache, 3.5 Inch - WD40EFZX

Pros: Packaged well, came quickly.

Overall Review: Runs quiet and cold, after hours of writing, swallowing terabytes of archives smoothly, as expected. SMART reports are simple and clean. In order to write a real review, would need to run tests after a period of months ... and I have not done that.

10/21/2021

Pipeline

Seagate Video ST2000VM003 2TB 5900 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
Seagate Video ST2000VM003 2TB 5900 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Manufactured Mar, 2013. SMART data says powered on 2 times, and run for 2 hours. Basically unused, if not new. Cosmetically perfect. Low cost, high capacity. Runs surprisingly cool.

Cons: Mine says "Seagate Pipeline HD" -- Not sure where "Skyhawk" comes from in description. --- Edited -- with very little use, this died in just over 1 year! Possibly a heavily used drive, that had its SMART data doctored.

Overall Review: Like another review below, I got thrown into a blind panic using HD Tune for a slow, bad sector check. Appeared for a moment that the last 9% of the disk was bad. Thankfully not. Partition Wizard also malfunctions, showing that the last 9% of the disk is some sort of ghost extended partition. These particular old Windows utilities, for some reason, think there are more addressable sectors than are really there, and that the drive is 2TB (to the power of 2), not 2TiB (power of 10). Linux hdparm -I, fdisk, gdisk, and gparted all agree on the last addressable sector, and size partitions accordingly. Two trillion bytes as advertised. To reiterate, the SMART data is clean. No relocated blocks, no bad sectors.

Works, but would not say "Fast Charging."

Rosewill RHB-344 USB 3.0 4-Port Hub and Fast Charging with Voltage & Current Display Screen For Each Port Detection - Retail
Rosewill RHB-344 USB 3.0 4-Port Hub and Fast Charging with Voltage & Current Display Screen For Each Port Detection - Retail

Pros: Very nifty device, for the cut-rate price. It is a USB 3.0 hub, and does read volts and amps for every port.

Cons: Does not deliver much more than 1 amp to any single port. Does not seem to deliver more than 2 amps, in sum total, to combinations of ports ... so, it may be under-utilizing the 3+ amp transformer.

Overall Review: The wall wort says 3.5 amps, and delivers at 5.4V ... that maybe too much. The plug is too long to seat flush with the hub device. Have not had it long enough to discover if it will deliver more juice to a single port, given a different power source.

10/25/2016

Much Faster Than Advertized

ADATA 32GB UV128 USB 3.2 Gen 1 Flash Drive (AUV128-32G-RBY)
ADATA 32GB UV128 USB 3.2 Gen 1 Flash Drive (AUV128-32G-RBY)

Pros: CrystalDiskMark agrees with observations, that it writes at about 22mb/s, and reads faster than my USB 3.0 rig accurately measures, 80 to 116mb/s. Faster than advertized! Excellent deal for an economy flash drive.

Cons: Would like a smaller, slimmer housing ... but these "cheap/flimsy" comments I read on other reviews are without merit. Very solid plastic, locks into place.

Overall Review: This seems to be an entirely different animal than the blue 16gb UV128's that I recently purchased at NewEgg, which read/write at 28 and 10mb/s. The starting (512 byte) sector is also different ... @96 for these yellow 32gb ones, and @128 for the blue. Hope that you all realize, that when you reformat one of these (to NTFS, to store 4gb+ files), you should always use the same starting sector that it was shipped with -- makes me wonder, why this info is not printed on every flash device? Due to the vastly different reports here on speed, would guess that ADATA is putting different guts into their UV128 product housings. Also believe some of the negative reviews come from folks using these as boot devices (splatting an ISO on them), then reformatting with an odd-numbered starting sector. tch tch. Never ever do that.