Joined on 02/27/05
For the Price - Can't Beat It!
Pros: It took me a while to appreciate the performance of this card but I found that using a smaller rather than larger stripe size improved performance. Try it yourself using a benchmark program, I think you'll like it. My stats: 4 RaptorX 150Gb RAID0 in a 16x PCI slot (EVGA 780i mb) 64Mb Stripe Burst 252MB/s Ave read 167MB/s NOOoooo! 32Mb Stripe Burst 445MB/s Ave read 229MB/s 16Mb Stripe Burst 450MB/s Ave read 300MB/s HOORah Very pleased, I was thinking about going to an ARECA board, but I'm not sure the extra money would lead to that worthwhile an improvement.
Cons: Not an IOP341 card
Overall Review: Under $100 on newegg best bang/buck
Completely NonStandard
Pros: Inexpensive. Takes decent pictures.
Cons: Everything about this camera is nonstandard. The cable, the method of downloading pictures (on my mac), the controls on the camera. You can't just pick it up and use it like a Sony or Nikon, take some pics and hookup to your mini-USB and get the pictures from the standard USB-drive interface.
Great Board/Easy Build
Pros: Easy to get up and running, don't forget the extra 8 pin power connector. Solid, heavy board, typical great Gigabyte quality. 8 gig memory was the icing on the cake!
Cons: No cons, you have to pay to get the nicer features
Overall Review: I have built quite a few Gigabyte boards up, and always prefer them because they are easier to work with and have the highest success rate for me (100%)
Excellent and Powerful
Pros: Fast performance, good software (Adaptec Storage Manager and BIOS support). Flexible in settings and features. Reliable if you keep it cool.
Cons: Really hot card, you need a fan dedicated to it.
Overall Review: I bought this the first week it was out (2-3 years ago). Very glad I did. I had the card fail at about 1.5 years, and Adaptec replaced with no problems. Today added 6th disk to a 5 disk RAID 5 array while in operation with no down time. Good documentation.
Excellent and Pricey
Pros: Very similar shape and feel as the Logitech MX518. That’s a good thing since that’s the highest rated mouse on Newegg (I have one also). It is a little smaller (an improvement) and it has the rubberized coating on the top (also better). Razer software is also better than Logitech’s, so the price premium is partly justified. Also has cool blue lights.
Cons: Annoying installation. Razer should take some of the money they use for packaging and invest it in usability. Maybe let some of their staff intern at Apple Computer for a while. I’m not going to describe the problems, just take these hints. When you go to the razer support website, don’t just look down the list of downloads and select the most recent version. You need to download 1) The firmware updater and 2) the drivers. If you just look at the list and download the most recent version number, you will miss half of the package. The Imperator Configurator app is in the driver download. When you run the firmware updater (at least in Win7), you need to know that when you plug in the imperator mouse with the 3 buttons pressed to update firmware, THE MOUSE GOES DEAD! Where it says to click next – What do you do with a dead mouse???, DON’T unplug & plug it back in and click Next. Instead you need to have a 2nd mouse installed to press -Next- and select -Update Firmware-.
Overall Review: Razer is just cool. Of course you have to pay a premium, and installation day can be annoying, but once that is over, it’s a bit better than the competition, especially if you have the $ to toss around.
Pricey Dependable Fast Great firmware and software
Pros: I have the 51645 with 20 ports that I bought when they first came out. Very solid performance and very fast up to a limit. I hit a wall in my performance testing when I tried more and more RAID disks. I expected to reach 1 gb/s throughput on 5 160G Raptors, but peaked out with only 4 Raptors, and throughput didn't improve after that. The software is very good, from the bios to the utility, but it isn't the easiest to use and takes some time to get used to. Adding a drive to a working array and rebuilding during use takes a LOT of time (sometimes up to a week). Avoid rebuilding from within bios. Formatting takes a long time also. Init drives from bios not windows for best performance.
Cons: Adaptec tech support is good, but didn't take much of an interest. Site wouldn't allow me to register serial number for a year because it wasn't recognized as a valid product (finally fixed). This card runs REAL hot. Too hot to touch. My card has been booting intermittantly for the last week (not appearing at all 25% of the time). I have to figure that one out.
Overall Review: I don't understand why these cards are so expensive, there are $100 cards out there with as many chips on the card, guess it's low demand.