cover
Daniel F.

Daniel F.

Joined on 11/02/10

0
0

Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 7
Most Favorable Review

Great PFSense Router / Firewall

Jetway HBJC200F99-525-B Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System
Jetway HBJC200F99-525-B Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System

Pros: Ships with 2 gigabit Intel nics, and easily expandable to 5 for another $60 daughter card add on. I personally own 4 of these motherboards (the JNF99FL's) and they have all worked fantastic as NAS's and routers. I am using this at the office I work at as our primary router and firewall, which allows us to split our internet connection off to some of the other tenants renting space in the same building. We all save $$ and get a much faster connection speed! I used dedicated NICs for each tenant, but you could achieve the same thing with VLANs and a single LAN port.

Cons: I really wish the PCI slot was a PCIe! I can never get enough SATA or Ethernet...

Overall Review: PS: You can actually use 8GB of DDR3 memory in these motherboards, even though they only say 4GB. Works great with ZFS on FreeBSD!

10/29/2012
Most Critical Review

Headache

HGST HDS721050CLA362 (0F10381) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
HGST HDS721050CLA362 (0F10381) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Cheep, 7200RPM, second one seems to be working.

Cons: Installed in customers computer, and died after 3 days. She lost three school reports.

Overall Review: No data recovery techniques in Windows or Linux would get the hard drive to respond. This was very hard to explain after replacing her existing hard drive, which ran out of sectors. Two stars because the replacement has been working for over a month.

Perfect Router Board PFSense

OEM Production 2550L2D-MxPC Intel NM10 Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System
OEM Production 2550L2D-MxPC Intel NM10 Black Mini / Booksize Barebone System

Pros: I have installed 4 of these as internet routers in small to medium size offices using PFSense. The 2 NICs work great and have never had performance issues. I run snort IDS and have tested with thousands of simultaneous connections saturating 100Mbps of bandwidth with minimal CPU overhead. Never had any issues with them and this setup easily competes with Cisco gear under the $600 range while offering loads of additional features.

Cons: Gets a little warm, but none of them have had any issue or failed.

Overall Review: I'll keep buying these as long as they keep selling them! An odd quirk, but the PFSense driver seems to not support the LED status lights on the box. During the BIOS boot stage the LED lights come on, but as soon as PFSense (BSD) takes over the LEDs shut off. The Linux driver however works fine with the LEDs. Just note if you are using PFSense/BSD, don't trust the LED to determine the interface status.

Amazing product

Ubiquiti ERLite-3-US Edgemax EdgeRouter Lite-3 3x Gigabit LAN Ports
Ubiquiti ERLite-3-US Edgemax EdgeRouter Lite-3 3x Gigabit LAN Ports

Pros: I own 2 of these and I have to say I have been very impressed. As others have said, is based off of Vyatta (now VyOS) with a very Juniper'ish CLI. These routers have out performed many of our Cisco boxes, we are about to deploy several of these at branch offices. Features I'm using are: WAN Load balancing, Clustering / HA, OSPF routing, DHCP, DSN, Vlans / VIF, link bonding, OpenVPN tunneling, and more!

Cons: Ubiquiti changed some of the CLI commands from the base Vyatta/VyOS image, but not a big deal.

Overall Review: Highly recommended. Learn the CLI! It's very simple!

Excellent performance and reliability in Apple MBp

Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 2.5" 240GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MKNSSDCR240GB
Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 2.5" 240GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MKNSSDCR240GB

Pros: Amazing speed. My boot time went from 45 seconds to 15 seconds to get to the login screen in OSX. After login, applications relaunch simultaneously and finish in 20 seconds or so. Before with the stock HD, it took about a minute for everything to settle. Easy install, replaced the HD perfectly.

Cons: None. Best upgrade I've made.

Overall Review: Currently in the primary drive bay in an Apple MacBook Pro 13" unibody purchased in mid 2011. Before the SSD, I upgraded the RAM to 16GB, and the SSD I much more noticeable of an upgrade. I was able to clone my old HD to the SSD and replace the DVD drive with the HD. The SSD backups to the old HD, in case of any failures do I can immediately boot off the backup.

Correction to: BIOS doesnt allow power on boot

Jetway JNF99FL-525-LF Fanless Intel Atom D525, 6*SATA2, Dual Intel GbLAN, Mini-ITX MB
Jetway JNF99FL-525-LF Fanless Intel Atom D525, 6*SATA2, Dual Intel GbLAN, Mini-ITX MB

Pros: I now own 4 of these and have had no issues with ANY of them. Each is running 6 7200RPM drives.

Cons: Still None!

Overall Review: Just to let everyone know, the Jetway JNF99FL CAN boot after a power failure. Here are the steps: 1. Update to the version 4 BIOS (maybe not necessary, but I updated the BIOS before I tried the following. Still, it can't hurt!) 2. In the BIOS settings, go to the Power Management tab and change ERP Function to "Disable". You will now see several more options appear. 3. In the BIOS settings, go to the Integrated Peripherals tab and change Pwr Status after PWR Failure to "Always On" or "Former Status". Enjoy your JNF99FL!