Pros: Definitely seems to be efficient. I have an I5-750 with G210 passively-cooled video card idling at about 39 watts. The 120mm fan moves a decent amount of air but stays very quiet.

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: It should be noted that I haven't installed a hard drive yet (using an Intel X25-M SSD as the boot drive.) However, my WD 1TB Green should only bring idle power up to about 43W. And most of the time it'll be ramped down, keeping my idle at about 40W.

Pros: Cheap, quiet, cool, fast for media media files

Cons: Will not play well with mdadm in ubuntu server - gets kicked out the RAID 1 array almost daily

Overall Review: I had previously written that these drives had failed on me. After further investigation, I found that they weren't physically failing but rather were not waking up from standby quickly enough for mdadm in my RAID 1 array. The error logs showed that there were repeated attempts to read from the drive (connection was being reset and downgraded), but in the end mdadm would mark it as failed and kick it out of the array. Both drives have passed various diagnostics tests and can successfully be rebuilt into the array. However, within 24 hours I will get another notice of RAID failure. As a test, I disabled spindown on one of these drives, and it's now gone 3 days without "failing." Since I don't want to keep them spun up constantly, they won't work for me. The WD 1.5TB green that I bought last week has not had this problem, so I will be picking up another one of those in order to keep my power consumption to a minimum. Should work fine as a single drive, I would imagine.

Pros: I like the horizontal form factor better than the vertical ones. It supports larger drives, unlike my old dock.

Cons: The cable included with the dock caused data corruption. I was adding a 4 TB drive to the BTRFS array on my file server to replace a smaller drive. I don't have enough SATA ports to add a temp drive, so I always have to do this through USB. I had bought this USB 3.0 dock specifically to speed up this process. As BTRFS was migrating data to the drive, I noticed that it was going extremely slowly (no more than 100 MB per minute). When I checked the device stats of the array, I was alarmed to see tons of write errors on the new drive. Initially I thought the drive was faulty, but I swapped drives and then started getting errors on that drive. Once I swapped the cable for an old (2.0) cable, it started working OK. Fortunately, I caught this early enough that only 200 GB was corrupted, and BTRFS was able to fully fix it from the RAID1 copy with a scrub.

Overall Review: I am a little bummed, because this dock is now just a USB 2.0 dock, since I don't have a spare USB 3 A cable. I took a look at the Orico website, but it looks like it'd be too much of a pain to request a new cable. I guess I'll eventually have to buy a replace to get this drive to operate at high speed.

Pros: Seems to work well, competitive price

Cons: None so far

Overall Review: At first I thought I might have a bad stick, because my new computer froze during Windows Experience Index rating and Prime 95 testing. However, a removal and re-seat seems to have corrected the issue. I'll write a new review if I have any further problems.

Pros: Fanless, not too expensive, doesn't seem too power hungry

Cons: None.

Overall Review: My entire I5-750 system is idling at 40W, so this this card does not suck up too much juice. It's probably overkill for me, as I don't game, but on the bright side it handles video decoding with ease.

Pros: Cheap, no power supply to dispose of

Cons: Steal is somewhat flimsy, but it's not a problem if you take care when assembling the computer. Once it's all together, it's strong enough. The glossy finish is going to look awful after a year of use, I'm sure

Overall Review: I wish the whole glossy black look would go away. Matte finishes are much better, in my opinion.