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Daniel D.

Daniel D.

Joined on 06/07/01

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 10
Most Favorable Review

Latest version is Fanless

NETGEAR 24-Port Gigabit Ethernet Unmanaged Switch | JGS524
NETGEAR 24-Port Gigabit Ethernet Unmanaged Switch | JGS524

Pros: Just works, Silent, internal power supply

Cons: connectivity / speed lights are all on the left side of the box - prefer when the lights are above each port like on other netgear switches

Overall Review: Lots of reviews of this product say it has a loud fan. The most recent version is fanless - I purchased in February 2013 - so totally silent. The marketing materials in the box have not been changed to reflect this, but the outside of the box now says fanless, and the unit is indeed silent.

Most Critical Review

Click of Death

Seagate BarraCuda LP ST31500541AS 1.5TB 5900 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive
Seagate BarraCuda LP ST31500541AS 1.5TB 5900 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Cheap, quiet, low power

Cons: Poor quality and poor warranty service. Drive suffering the click of death roughly 45 days after purchase. Seagate refuses to replace with new drive (only will replace with refurb) and also demands that I pay shipping to return the defective drive to them. For a drive that fails this quickly they should pay full replacement costs and replace with a brand new drive.

Good hardware, problematic firmware - swap to dd-wrt

NETGEAR Nighthawk AC1900 Dual Band Wi-Fi Router, Gigabit Router, Open Source Support, Circle with Smart Parental Controls, Compatible with Amazon Alexa (R7000)
NETGEAR Nighthawk AC1900 Dual Band Wi-Fi Router, Gigabit Router, Open Source Support, Circle with Smart Parental Controls, Compatible with Amazon Alexa (R7000)

Pros: Solid hardware, great range, runs cool. built in ipv6 works perfectly, easy to swap out factory firmware for dd-wrt open source firmware.

Cons: The factory firmware is somewhat immature. I have a number of devices with static ipv4 addresses on my network, the router tries to assign them dynamic addresses anyway and the built in DNS gets confused - result is that ipv4 traffic does not work with a mix of dhcp and status devices. Net gear support struggled to understand the problem, other users have documented it on the net gear forums. Overall I found the firmware a pain to work with and slow topmost changes.

Overall Review: Swapped out factory firmware for kong build of dd-wrt. Combination is fantastic - stable, fast and long range.

5 for 5 good so far

Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive
Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive

Pros: Ordered 5 of these on black friday special for a media server. Using in RAID 5 array - so about 15 TB usable now and will eventually expand to 8 drives with 22 or 23 TB usable. All drives tested out ok and are running fine so far. Much cooler than the Samsung 2 TB 7200 RPM drives (about 3 years old) they replaced - but can't complain about the Samsungs - no failures across an 8 drive array running almost constantly for three year. Using with LSA / 3Ware RAID Card. Each individual drive peaks about 150MBs write speed.

Cons: Would certainly prefer 5-year warranty like the old days. Otherwise no complaints yet.

Really like it

ASUS 27" AH-IPS LCD Monitor AH-IPS 5ms (GTG) D-Sub, HDMI, Displayport VX279Q
ASUS 27" AH-IPS LCD Monitor AH-IPS 5ms (GTG) D-Sub, HDMI, Displayport VX279Q

Pros: Bought this via a black friday deal - amazing value for an entry-level IPS panel monitor. Like that it has multiple built in color profiles including sRGB. Terrific image quality and great contrast for video and photo editing. Kids are happy playing minecraft on it. We watched 1080p Avatar on it for kicks and see amazing detail, color and clarity.

Cons: As prior reviewers have noted, the menu buttons are very sensitive, and the menu is not intuitive and the non-obvious settings are not documented at all. I really wish monitor makers would just let you use an app to configure things like the TV manufacturers are starting to do.

Overall Review: Very happy, great value.

Not for RAID

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: Fast, Good Value

Cons: Drive periodically freezes causing RAID Arrays to Fail. Seagate still markets this drive as "Great for RAID" - but won't support it in RAID environments. Stay away from this drive if you intend to deploy in a RAID environment, particularly RAID 5.

Overall Review: There is a long thread on the Seagate forum discussing the RAID problems. Seagate Support appears to have no interest in fixing the problem - their solution is to tell you to buy enterprise drives instead of these.

11/10/2009