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John S.

John S.

Joined on 09/01/05

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 3
Most Favorable Review

Good Printer + Good Support

HP Photosmart 3310 Q5863A Up to 32 ppm Black Print Speed Up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi color Color Print Quality Bluetooth / Ethernet (RJ-45) / USB InkJet MFC / All-In-One Color Printer - Optional Wireless
HP Photosmart 3310 Q5863A Up to 32 ppm Black Print Speed Up to 4800 x 1200 optimized dpi color Color Print Quality Bluetooth / Ethernet (RJ-45) / USB InkJet MFC / All-In-One Color Printer - Optional Wireless

Pros: I use this printer primarily for color photos from my digital camera and for the occasional scan/fax/copy. Works well for all of these functions.

Cons: Scan quality is OK, but not great - gets lines and lint even when the platen is squeaky clean and the original is pristine. Ink system failed and the printer had to be replaced, but HP service took care of everything with a smile.

Most Critical Review

Very slow NAS, irksome security, missing features

Netgear ReadyNas NV+  1TB (2 x 500GB) 4-bay Network Storage (NAS) w/ Gigabit & speeds up to 25MBps
Netgear ReadyNas NV+ 1TB (2 x 500GB) 4-bay Network Storage (NAS) w/ Gigabit & speeds up to 25MBps

Pros: Small footprint, easy to set up, good user interface, hot swap

Cons: <b>Performance:</b> The reviewers raved about this NAS. So I took it as an article of faith that it would perform superbly. After all, it's a dedicated NAS with 4 fast drives and a GigE connection. It should easily be able to deliver 50-60 MB/s reads and 40-50 MB/s writes. I should have checked the forums before buying. This NAS only does 20MB/s writes and 32MB/s reads in a fully loaded, performance tweaked configuration (4 drives configured with X-RAID, 1024MB memory, cached writes, no journaling). If you have a little know-how, you can build your own for the same money with double the performance. <b>Security:</b> Even with security set as open as possible, mixing CIFS (aka SMB) and NFS services on the same share resulted in permission and ownership conflicts <b>Missing Features</b> ssh download redirection bitTorrent

Overall Review: A poor value for the money. I sent mine back for a refund.

Beware of these drives

Seagate BarraCuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
Seagate BarraCuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: None. These drives are unusable.

Cons: I and many others have been experiencing serious problems with these drives including: * dropping out of RAID configurations for no apparent reason * being ejected from a RAID configuration due to read / write errors * freezing for up to 30 seconds These problems have been reported on Linux, Vista, XP, and OS X and appear to be related to how the drives flush their write cache. In many cases, the drives work fine for days or weeks before problems appear. In my case, I bought five of these for my Qnap TS-509 Pro and they worked great for about two weeks under various read / write loads. Since then, I've had all three of the problems mentioned above on different drives and they are growing progressively worse. The latest problem was three of the five drives disappearing from the RAID5 volume while I was attempting to copy the files to a different NAS. A work-around that has been successful for some is to disable the disk write cache. Other than the obvious performance pen