Pros: Spun discs while shining lasers.
Cons: After about a year it would pull the tray back in after two seconds when ejecting a disc. Died after three years.
Overall Review: I've had higher quality CD-ROM drives. Guess it's time to look at other brands for a replacement.
Pros: Takes HDMI from two units and feeds to one, along with USB keyboard, mouse, hub, and audio. Audio feeds through USB as long as kill-switch is off. Body is solid.
Cons: Switch buttons are pretty colicky/ Keyboard switching hasn't worked so far using key patterns indicated on insert. Not sure whether unit or software, but keyboard requires in/replugging after reboot (powered past POST and BIOS, stops once OS has finished loading). A few months in, and it starts strobing the keyboard (non-functional and backlight blinks) until mouse is unplugged for several seconds whenever the toggle is pressed, and on Windows the USB must be replugged to work. EVERY. TIME. YOU. SWITCH. Six months in, and now the Mouse and Keyboard ports no longer work, and the HDMI is defaulted to a low resolution.
Overall Review: The audio passthrough with killswitch is a nice solution for my lack of push-to-talk on chat programs — simply plug mic into KVM and headphones into PC Jack. Worked okay for a few months, started presenting goofy behaviors, and now, six months in, nearly completely worthless.
Pros: - Form factor is a neat idea. - Comes with thermal strips and radiator fins. - Cheap. Seems like a great way to add a cache to a spinning RAID.
Cons: The gentle vibration of hard drives sitting in rubber floaters as causes this unit to become unavailable twice now, corrupting my raid twice now.
Overall Review: The first time I'd left the machine off overnight, and then took the adapter apart and put it back together again, so I had no idea whether the issue was thermal or mechanical or a defect in the drive. This last time, I simply turned the machine off, opened the case, pressed on the adapter, turned the machine back on, and it showed back up. I guess this is the ~~second time~~ I'll be rebuilding and restoring the raid, and looking at adapters that have case brackets so I know they'll hold still. Or maybe a smidge of glue? Third time's the charm. Will see if I can manage to get a refund, or I'm throwing it out.
Pros: Purchased as one of items on ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero AM4 AMD X370 list. No issues so far, four months and counting.
Cons: DDR4 is overpriced, but at least less than VGAs are right now.
Overall Review: Picking up another set for ramdisk.
Pros: I've been running this thing for almost six years now, and it's still a major reason for me not to bother upgrading to modern hardware. I've replaced the cooler this year, and it's back to an extended load ~9-10 (~700%) peaking at 42C.
Cons: Attached to a board with PCIe 2.0 and DDR3.
Overall Review: I imagine that by the time I have to replace my desktop, I'll be getting a decent deal on PCIe5.
Pros: Looks like a CPU cooling device. I would speculate that one would be happy with the device if they received a good unit out of the gate.
Cons: Moderate load has been running for a few hours (i5, 25%-50%), the cores are reporting 85C-100C and the fan is blowing cool. Purchased this 15 weeks ago, and currently have a second dead unit (with radiator fin damage to both sides) and no resolution in sight to show for it.
Overall Review: Radiator pump determined to be DOA. Waiting for replacement. Update: Support is underwhelming. Tickets are handled via email, and response time feels like maybe one guy working part time. I was requested to remove the pump from the CPU and boot back up during diagnostics, and after receiving a second defunct (and damaged) pump, and providing all data requested the first time around, was told that it was probably incompatible and to just plug it into the PSU. After responding to that, I was told that they mixed up devices, mine was fine, and they're sending it to Singapore for analysis. What good this does me, I have no clue. At this point I would have been better served buying a fan. UPDATE: It has been 15 weeks from start of email chain to reception of functional (like-new radiator state) of use. First I received a unit with damaged radiator fins and dead pump to boot, then another of the wrong shape that was also damaged to the point of warping, then finally something almost new that runs. It's been just over 5 months between original purchase and useful delivery date.
Pros: Small profile fits in mobo without running into RAM.
Cons: Appears to only work with Windows, so I have no idea whether it works at all.
Overall Review: Shame on me for not thoroughly researching the part before ordering it, but at least it was only $30 wasted. Was trying to expand the storage on a home server, will probably buy a new mobo instead.
Pros: Decided to expand storage on little cloud server/add ftps. The mobo only has two sata and no USB3 headers. This was litterally plug n play. Dropped the card in PCIe slot, plugged in third HDD and external USB3/eSATA, boot machine, and kernel drivers worked without a hitch.
Cons: If i had Windows I don't know if the suncatcher would have provided issues for driver install (as others mentioned).
Pros: Seems to be of solid build. Secondary backlighting option allows for each key to be turned on or off. While it would be nice if it was USB3, USB2 extension through keyboard allows for convenient splitter location taped under desk for close mouse sensor and flash drives.
Cons: An hour or so after first plugging it in at home the keyboard stopped communicating with the PC. The lights would turn on and off, but nothing registered with the device. After rebooting, keyboard works (for the most part). On main desktop CAPS lock light is stuck on, and others are stuck off. On nearby server the CAPS light is stuck off, and the other two work normally. I'm not really sure why this would be the case. One would think the toggle would not rely on software. Additionally, BIOS has thrown a warning that there is no keyboard connected during every boot. Keyboard works at time of login forward.
Pros: Fast Quiet
Cons: First would not allow my machine to boot, but once I could contact ASUS (weekend had to dig for a phone number) newegg was quick to RMA. Second caused POST to reboot three times before booting to OS. May be hard to fit in mid chasis.
Pros: Pretty fast; it didn't cross my mind to try to benchmark it while I was in the middle of fighting with it.
Cons: This is not a 240GB SSD, it is a pair of 120GB SSDs with a fakeraid0. The only way to use this drive is to use the provided drivers to install with Windows 7, or else have knowledge on how to set up software raid. After trying to install to either drive and installing the bootloader to either drive or to a HDD, the only way to not get a missing filesystem error is to install mdadm during install to create raid, mount system and fix grub before reboot. When I contacted OCZ they told me the only thing that could work is Win7 and that they will not take anything that is not broken, "sorry for any inconvenience".
Overall Review: Unless you are intending to use Windows 7, or else know what you are doing, this would not be a smart buy.
Pros: Really fast transfering large files when using USB3.0, and plenty of space. Ideal for keychain.
Cons: When I attempted to partition the drive I ended up with an unusable blob. I tried to format several times each to ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, ntfs using gparted, and again fat32, ntfs and (I think it was called exfat?) both selecting (and not) the quick format option on Windows 7 Profesional x64 all eventually (non-quick all went for over 16 hours each overnight) ending with a failure.
Overall Review: I wish I had found this sooner as it looks to be hardware related, but took me two months to discover.
Pros: light aluminum design quick and easy assembly long USB3 cord
Cons: hdd light bright as hell auxiliary power cable as second cord less than ideal cannot get ExpressCard to work on my nix laptop
Overall Review: everything works as stated. strong, light, easy to use.
Pros: Decent size and speed for the cost.
Cons: Goes offline without provocation. Used it as a bcache for a raid for a little while, but it disappeared three times in three months, causing an entire RAID to become worthless (remember to take separate backups, people). Swapped out with desktop 512GiB stick, and desktop has crashed three more times now, the latest just now while I was working. There was no elevated temperature, and the only real work going on was read and write to a HDD raid (converting some video stored on the raid, written to the raid, with /tmp on a RAMDISK).
Overall Review: I'd wasted a bunch of time assuming the issue had been with a cheap Chinese NVMe>PCIe adapter I'd ordered at the same time, so outside of Newegg's return policy. Will try to reach out to the manufacturer, but not feeling confident, and will likely avoid ADATA in the future.