Pros: This is good, cheap media. I have always liked RiTek and have never really had issues with their media. These burn reliably in my LG burner, never had a coaster. I trust these discs to hold my data for many years.
Cons: They are rated at 16X but I am only allowed to burn at 4X or 8X in Nero. Doesn't bother me since I burn everything at 4X (basically eliminates coasters when I do this). This might bother some, but I think you're asking for trouble if you try to burn over 8X anyway.
Overall Review: I use a lot of different brands, including Sony, Memorex, Taiyo Yuden, and of course RiTek RiData. This is good general-purpose media and I am satisfied and will probably buy more when I run out.
Pros: This thing is good, not great. Works fine for me in the gym, I zip it into my pocket and forget about it. It was cheap so I'm not that worried about breaking it or losing it (although its so small it could easily be lost). Sound quality is good with different headphones, I didn't even try the earbuds. If you want a player for working out or running, or listening at work or on vacations, or even to hook to your car, you wont be disappointed.
Cons: Well, the shuffle play sucks. It loves to play the same songs every time I go to the gym. I have to turn off shuffle, pick a new song to start the random "seed", and then turn shuffle back on to get a different mix. I'm hoping they will fix this in a future firmware release. It doesn't work with playlists or I'd load a shuffled playlist. Also slow to respond to button pressing while playing, other reviews have mentioned this. Hasn't really bothered me that much though. Oh and transfers TO the player (writes) are really slow, takes like an hour to load the whole 2GB. Transfers off the device (reads) are much faster and take a couple minutes, more like usb 2.0
Overall Review: A few annoyances, but overall a decent player for a cheap price and a good value for the money in my opinion. Hopefully they will fix some of these issues in a future firmware release, but even if they don't, I still feel its worth it.
Pros: This is the best player I have ever owned. Size, ease of use, disk I/O is fast, sound quality is great, really tight little package. There is an active forum on the sandisk website that is actually monitored by sandisk developers, and the firmware authors are actually communicating with the users and adopting suggestions, which is incredible. If you are debating between the Creative Zen Stone Plus or the Sansa Clip, they are both nice, but the Clip is the best.
Cons: 2GB isn't quite enough, I'm tempted to get the 4GB clip. Random play can sometimes play the same songs, or the same group of songs, but this is supposed to be fixed soon with a new firmware. The player organizes tracks with ID3 tags instead of filenames, so a lot of my songs came up as "unknown artist/album." Editing all the tags was annoying, but now I like it better than just filename/folder organization. I would consider this a "Con" though, because it should offer BOTH folder organization AND ID3 tags.
Overall Review: When you first connect the player, if your computer doesn't have Windows Media Player ver. 10 or higher, the player will not be recognized, because it defaults to MTP mode. To get the player to connect on a non-windows box or windows w/o WMP 10, switch the device to "HOLD" on the side and press and hold the center button while you connect the usb, which forces MSC mode (works just like a memory stick). you can then upgrade the firmware at the sandisk site and set it to always connect in MSC mode in the options.
Pros: Great drive, better than any I have owned before. Time will tell its reliability, but so far I have burned DVD-R and DVD+R DL with no coasters. I burn everything at the slowest speed (4x) to avoid problems, so I rarely have coasters with any drive.
Cons: None that I can think of its a really good drive. I can't comment on the noise because its in a computer with Vantec Tornado fans that sounds like a hair dryer.
Overall Review: This is my first LG burner and I am very happy with it. I have been recommending it to my friends.
Pros: Good drive, runs a little hot but otherwise fine. Does what its supposed to do, I can't complain. Put it in my tivo and it has been quiet and reliable so far.
Cons: No so far, seems to be a quality drive.
Overall Review: My tivo with a 160GB western digital drive runs at 39C, and the tivo with this 500GB WD drive runs at 43C, so you see the heat difference
Pros: Great drive, very fast. I got 2 and put them in a RAID0 configuration, got 745GB when formatted. I love these drives, and WD has always been good to me. I'm tempted to get another 2...
Cons: None so far. Great product
Overall Review: Don't let the SATA150 fool you, this drive is still very fast. The bottleneck in drives is not the interface but the rotational speed. ATA150 vs. 3.0Gb/s will actually have comparable access speeds, well 3.0Gb/s may be slightly faster in burst speed, but nothing you could notice except in a benchmark. No hard drive can get close to 150mbps that SATA1 has, so SATA2's 300mbs is overkill and a gimick.
Pros: What's not to love? 32Mb cache, twin processors for increased performance, only 3 platters on this 1TB drive (less platters means less to break), and a 5 year warranty! Also, the motor shaft has "StableTrac" for reduced vibrations, and the "NoTouch" ramp load technology prevents any contact between the heads and the disk surface when idle. Only thing faster is a velociraptor, but unless you require ridiculously fast HD access speeds for gaming or something, 2 of these in RAID0 as your primary C drive will be more than enough. I use these on my new Q9650 rig for video encoding and it flies.
Cons: Runs a little on the hot side. Put in a well ventilated case or a quality external enclosure. A little noisier than other drives I guess but this doesn't bother me...my CPU fans are louder than anything else. Apparently, when using these disks in a RAID array, some people report problems with RAID controllers dropping these disks out of the array.
Overall Review: If you plan on putting these drives in RAID, use google to find the WD TLER utility to enable TLER. Enabling TLER (time limted error recovery) forces the drive to give up its own recovery process early, and hand the job over to the RAID controller. This prevents the RAID controller from dropping the drive from the array. No need to buy an RE3 enterprise drive for 1.5X the cost of this drive just for RAID purposes, unless you plan to run your drives 24/7 I'd skip it, this is basically the same drive as the RE3 minus a few other firmware tweaks, especially once you enable TLER (set it to the default 7 seconds for both read and write). Note: Don't enable TLER if you just use the drive by itself as a standalone (non-RAID).