Joined on 06/05/03
I had my doubts, but in the end, all is well.
Pros: Good price, nice construction. Screw-less mounting for your drives and expansion cards. Both of which work very well and are quite clever. The entire front of the case is essentially a filter (metal mesh with thin foam behind it).
Cons: It is advertised as having two external 3.5 bays, but one of them is actually taken up by the front USB/audio. If you need two external 3.5 bays, you will lose those features. Front USB is also a bit tight, to the point it feels like I might bust the ports right through the front of the case. While it is nice that the front of the case has the filter material, the only way to clean it is to take the whole front of the case off, and pull out all the individual pieces of foam.
Overall Review: I was really worried about getting this case without there being a prior review, but I can say now that I am happy I went with it. The case is very well made, and at a fair price. It also affords good ventilation, with the advantage of having the entire front panel acts as a filter for the front fan (which is not included, but the case has ample mounting room for one). I have only very minor problems with this case, and would absolutely buy another.
Looks like Mac support is a dead end
Pros: Cheap and small
Cons: Only works on G3 machines, drivers don't work on new versions of OS X.
Overall Review: I bought this card for a B&W G3 that my wife uses. While the card is detected by OS X 10.4.9, it does not actually work. It will detect that devices have been connected, but will be unable to communicate with them. The official OS X drivers provided by the manufacturer are outdated, and only work on older versions of OS X (I believe the readme mentioned 10.2). So until updated drivers are made available, you might as well forget about this card for your Mac. I didn't get a chance to try it under Windows/Linux.
Good, though had me worried for a bit
Pros: Good price, high media compatibility.
Cons: Some issues with getting newest firmware, only one indicator light that isn't very helpful.
Overall Review: For the first week I had this drive, I was very upset with it. I do not run Windows on any of my machines, having switched over to Linux a few years ago. In that time, this DVD drive was the only piece of hardware that I had purchased that simply would not work under Linux. This was particularly infuriating, as all optical drives are supposed to follow identical standards, and there should be no problems using any off the shelf drive. Well, long story short, if you want to use this drive properly under Linux you need to disable “Use multi-mode by default” in the kernel configuration. I have no idea why, and I only figured it out by experimenting with settings on my own. Some distros already have this disabled in their kernels, so it might not be a problem for you. But if you are having problems burning, you might need to make this adjustment.