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Wire M.

Wire M.

Joined on 05/20/05

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 4
Most Favorable Review

Big, Fast, Quiet and Cool

Toshiba 16TB Enterprise HDD SATA 6.0Gb/s 512e 7200 RPM 512MB Cache 3.5" Internal Hard Drive MG08ACA16TE
Toshiba 16TB Enterprise HDD SATA 6.0Gb/s 512e 7200 RPM 512MB Cache 3.5" Internal Hard Drive MG08ACA16TE

Pros: A pair arrived on time and properly packaged. They spun right up and have been in use with perfect performance for a couple months. Consistent 200MB/s sustained transfers between SATA3 and in a UISB3 external enclosure. These are quiet, can barely hear operation, and run cool. Seagate 16s can make chirping noises, these don't.

Cons: Enterprise drive has slightly different bottom mounting screw locations that consumer drive, which affected my use in an Mac Pro with 3.5in trays. I worked around this by securing tray with two screws and using kapton tape (which has high tensile strength and which I happened to have some around).

Overall Review: Good stuff. Would buy again no problemo.

Most Critical Review

Rough start

OCZ Agility 4 2.5" 512GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) AGT4-25SAT3-512G
OCZ Agility 4 2.5" 512GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) AGT4-25SAT3-512G

Pros: Excellent price / capacity / performance.

Cons: Pain in the a... Unit worked long enough to clone a 380G existing tried-and-true 2010 15" Macbook Pro 10.7 system using an external FW800 enclosure. Booted from ext, then installed in Mac and rebooted. System immediately unstable with volume corruption, volume unrepairable. Updated firmware to 1.5 and Secure Erase--a pain cause no Mac tools from OCZ, and requires AHCI-capable SATA on PC to update firmware. No joy after update. Completely unstable. RMA with OCZ. They report could find no problem with unit, but sent a replacement at my request. Replacement DOA. Appeared to be open-box. RMA again. 3rd unit came in clean packaging and is working to write this review. Tho it's only been a day.

Overall Review: Unit doesn't work in a cheap bus-powered (two port cable) USB enclosure, even tho the enclosure works fine with several other hard disks and a brick powered FW enclosure. OCZ now offers a Mac compatible firmware upgrade download that works. OCZ generously covered the RMA shipping. OCZ support was mildly dismissive of original complaint when their tests indicated no problem. 'Said they tested on a AMD and it looks good, putting me in the position of having to request a replacement. The DOA replacement was in insecure packaging and looked previously handled. With 2nd RMA they just pushed it on through and didn't argue. It arrived in secure blisterpack and looked fresh. Support tickets are deleted after a week, bit it took then longer than that to get me the shipping label, so they aren't into keeping the lines of communication open for support dialog.

eSATA Good

Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 Metal 3.5" Black SATA I/II/III USB 3.0 & eSATA 4 Bay External Enclosure
Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 Metal 3.5" Black SATA I/II/III USB 3.0 & eSATA 4 Bay External Enclosure

Pros: see previous review

Cons: see previous review

Overall Review: Works fine on Mac Pro 2008 with a Silicon Image 3132 PCIe card with port-multiplier. I use a Habey HB-4627 2-port PCIe eSATA RAID controller (no longer available). Habey included a disc with OS X drivers, but I didn't try them. Am using the Mac 10.6 RAID drivers from the Silicon Image website with my system running OS X Lion (10.7.2). Note: There are two Mac driver packages available on the SI site: RAID-controller and non-RAID controller. Get the one needed for your SI based card. Driver installation was trivial and didn't even require a reboot. All drives mounted just as the installer completed. Delightful! eSATA performance is where is should be, as fast as the platters will go, and about 50MB/s sustained drive-to-drive within the enclosure. Am using a mix of Hitachi and Samsung 2TB drives. I complained about Mac sleep filesystem corruption problems in previous review. Haven't revisited yet. I don't think this is an enclosure defect and my rating goes up 2 eg

11/29/2011

quality on a budget

Hanns-G 21.5" LCD Monitor 5 ms 1920 x 1080 D-Sub, HDMI HH-221HPB
Hanns-G 21.5" LCD Monitor 5 ms 1920 x 1080 D-Sub, HDMI HH-221HPB

Pros: Bright, excellent color, good off-axis image quality. Out of box config is acceptable and calibrates very well. Makes an unexpectedly good quality display for image editing and graphics if you have the means to align it properly. Using Color Eyes Display Pro and a Xrite DTP 94 yielded nearly sRGB palette within 1 deltaE grays. Smooth gradients. Better than acceptable uniformity of brightness. Good contrast and blacks. Decently close to gamma 2.2 out of the box. High-res. Good scaling of lower-than-native resolutions. DVI connectivity with included DVI to HDMI cable.

Cons: Overly blue grayscale w/o compensation, typical of most cheap LCDs. Perfect once calibrated. Cheap stand typical of the price-point, but works fine.

Overall Review: Superb deal. Rivals displays costing twice as much. Off-axis viewing degrades gracefully w/o grotesque color shifts; better than most TN panels. Image quality meets demanding uses if you can calibrate it, even if just using a visual calibrator. DVI-D and HDMI are the same thing if you have an adapter such as included cable. Recommended for it's good value.

10/10/2009