Pros: Nice 1TB size, good data transfer rate Enterprise Class Raid disk drive. Quiet, with measured 110+ MB/S outer track and 60 MB/S inner track data transfer rates. ZERO bad blocks in all 4 drives. Very satisfied, once I received 4 working drives.

Cons: WD has QA or shipping problems. I ordered 4 of these drives and 2 of them were bad (1 DOA, 1 infant failure after only a few weeks). The 2 bad drives are separately reviewed, this review covers the 4 working drives, for which 5 Stars is valid.

Overall Review: Be prepared to act like Western Digital's QA department and reject some percentage of the drives. These are supposed to be Enterprise class drives with initial burn-in testing, etc. but the reject rate including other reviewer results is far too high. When you do eventually get good drives they are *very* good.

Pros: Nice 1TB size with good transfer rates, Enterprise Class Raid drive.

Cons: Arrived DOA. Clicked a couple of times when first powered on and then nothing; no response even after power cycling. Poor packaging - one layer of bubble wrap. WD either has terrible QC, or perhaps poor packaging shipping damage. In any case a very poor showing for an Enterprise Class Raid drive. Painless RMA process with Newegg, recieved replacement - separately reviewed.

Overall Review: WD apparently needs to get their QC act together.

Pros: Installed without difficulty. I updated the firmware and the card works under 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate. Tested with 2x 1TB WD drives and also with 4x Crucial 128GB SSDs. Over 700MB/S with 4 SSD drives, and over 220 MB/S with 2x 1TB drives, in Raid 0.

Cons: None at this time.

Overall Review: It would be nice if some of the SATA cable ends could be right or left angle. The included 1 to 4 SATA cable has all 4 ends at 180 degree and I haven't found any alternatives. This is not in any way a flaw of the controller.

Pros: This is a very solidly constructed workstation platform. All of the fans are variable speed, the power supply is both quiet and high efficiency, and there is plenty of internal space. The lowest 5 SATA drive slots are wired to the motherboard and all 8 drive slots can be used if you add another controller or get the motherboard version that supports SAS drives.

Cons: It really should have come with all 4 mid-plane fans instead of only 2. The 2 additional fan locations were not blanked off so air recirculation may occur instead of flowing through the chassis. You can easily remedy this by purchasing 2 additional fans from numerous on-line vendors (NewEgg doesn't carry these fans).

Overall Review: I have 9 total disk drives installed; 5 1 TB SATA and 4 128 GB SSD. 24 GB of DDR3-1333 and 2 Nehalem Xeon CPUs, a PCIe X16 graphics card and a 3ware 9650SE RAID card. Everything works flawlessly; I could not be any happier with this system. Since there are multiple fan speed profiles available, you may elect to use this as a server, despite some reviewer claims.