Pros: First some background – I have been a firmware engineer in the telecom industry. I’ve written drivers for Ethernet cards and firmware with Wi-Fi. I probably know more than most, but still would not consider myself an expert. First the setup was really fairly easy to setup and run. If you are doing generic web browsing or basic streaming you’ll probably find this a fairly decent device. You can setup the range extender via your browser and if you’ve setup a web based router you should have no problem. I set it up to go from my router in the basement up two floors on the other side of the house to a bedroom where the connectivity isn’t that great. I connected a laptop (wired and wireless), and a tablet and Wi-Fi phone connection. All worked fairly well given the previous problems I have had. I was getting somewhere in the range of 30-50MBps depending on how I was connected and the test time. Under best case scenarios you can sometimes about 80-90% of the rated speed with Ethernet but in practical terms of real use what I saw was reasonable. As 4K TVs (Quad HD) are coming into existence this holiday season, it is worth noting that Netflix is now streaming at Ultra HD and the connections will require about 15Mbps, so this device could realistically handle one or more connections (good!). I like the two Ethernet plugs on the Wi-Fi as opposed to one which often isn’t enough and forces you to buy a switch and eat another valuable wall socket to plug it in with.

Cons: The cons listed really didn't affect my rating very much because the price of this device if fairly low. Product designers are always vexed by the cost of perfect vs. good enough. In my opinion they struck a nice balance. First it’s only 100 Mbps which is still okay for most applications but if you are using it between you and your online storage you will find its really not all that great. If you have multiple streaming devices on the other side you may find it’s also not that great. I do video editing and download lots of very large software bundles and logs, I would not consider using it on the other side unless speed wasn't really much of a consideration. My guess is that I am probably not an average user in most cases however. It’s also stated that line suppressors may cause problems – this may be an issue for some though I use a whole house suppressor at my fuse box (the only way to go). But if you are in an apartment or can’t do something like this, you may find this to be an issue.

Overall Review: I think it’s important to note that even though the throughput is rated at 300Mbps that you will see at maximum 100Mpbs speeds as you are connected via a 10/100 port when wired. This should mean that you can connect several clients running at full speed before you start to take a performance hit. As I had no way to test this, I don’t know how it would work – but theoretically it should be okay. I believe this device is going to end up connected to large flat panel TV on the wall and a Roku and small dedicated PC to use on the screen. I've often had dropouts that I believe are related to my (existing) Wi-Fi connection and believe this device may make it more stable.

Pros: I setup the drive and installed it, did a backup to it, and all seemed good. A drive like this is targeted as big dumb storage. My experience is that it does that fairly well. I did hook it up to a USB 3 port and try copy 145GB of media files (video, music, total ~6K files), it did work and all appeared intact after the copy but I missed catching the finishing time. As far as a big dumb drive it was about as painless to install as you could hope for. For me, and I believe most real world users, reasonable speed is sufficient for archival purposes, and this meets that benchmark.

Cons: The advert on Newegg says 2 year warranty, the box says 1 year. One year is not sufficient on something that people will tend to use for an archives drive. If it’s just to do a onetime transfer of data and you have the data on another machine, maybe no problems? Not to be comical but with the size of a 5TB and a very short warranty, if you started writing today you might fill it up around the time the warranty expires. I had a problem with the shape of the brick power supply which was fat enough to make the plugs on both sides of it on the power strip unusable. As I currently work as a engineer for mass produced consumer products, I know every penny is sensitive in how it’s spent, but design choices like this always are an indicator as the general lack of thought given to the consumer experience – there are solutions that cost more, but are not prohibitive in products which retail in this price range.

Overall Review: I used to work for a few different storage companies and an SSD manufacturer as a FW engineer so I have some background in drive testing. I could go exhaustively through tests running benchmarks, but what I know was always the most important parameter was how long would a drive survive. There isn’t an application or a customer I can think of where it was okay if the drive died frequently. Unless your application isn’t sensitive to having the drive die quickly I would advise against this purchase. Stating the obvious, warranties are timed to not cost the manufacturer much money, which means that they are timed to expire before statistically significant numbers of the product start failing in large enough numbers to cost the manufacturer their profits. So a five year warranty means the manufacturer is pretty confident in their product, a manufacturer who gives a one year warranty probably hopes it will sit on your shelf for a few months before you go to use it. For me personally, the cost of the drive while not incidental is far less important than the value I place on my data and my time to gather, sort, categorize, etc. I can’t recommend this product only for that reason and give two eggs.

Pros: I worked for several years involved in switching power supply design and testing. I think it’s worth pointing out a few things that I haven’t seen covered in the other reviews, that the meaning of “Bronze” – and “80 Plus Certified” is a rating related to the efficiency of the power supply. If you look up 80 Plus in Wikipedia, you will get a pretty good write up. In simple terms this means (Power out (Watts)/ Power in (Watts)), and they label (some marketing here) the ratings as Titanium, Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and just “Plus”. So what does this mean to you? It means the more efficient the power supply the less energy it is. That energy is lost as heat and NOT used to power your computer. If more is lost as heat, the more the need for fans (e.g. noise, your electric costs are higher, etc). Bronze Plus means more than 80 percent efficient, where Gold means ~ 90 percent efficient, and Titanium > 90% but usually not by much. A Titanium power supply of the same Watts rating would typically cost about 3-4 times as much. It’s nice to be green, and if you can afford it but honestly at 100% rated output it would typically be about 8% or 0.08 x 650W = ~50W savings *if* your PC is drawing full power, must never do so typically it would be about ½ this. Keeping this in perspective, you need to make the choice between the planet or your pocket book. There is no average, so I can’t say for you, buy most PCs probably would idle around 20% and if you were running heavy graphics then you may be in the upper quadrant if you power supply were properly spec’ed for your needs. To be honest, if you were that “Green”, you may want to invest in a more power efficient processor as you would likely end up saving more power using the same bronze supply. Think 120W (older generation processors) – 35W (8th generation processors).. a net 85Ws of saving that far surpasses what you would save with the higher end power supplies. I like the modular connectors of the supply, I like that it is silent or near silent at idle and only seems to ramp up when there is a load on it. CoolMaster is one of the top 2-3 power supply manufacturers in my opinion and from my experience and if you want to run high frame rate games with high powered graphics cards, look again at the efficiency ratings above, even with Titanium you will need to dissipate 50W which is considerable and even the most efficient supplies use fans in this power range. Consider noise suppression headsets  The supply, the warranty, the manufacturer's reputation, the modularity of the connectors, it’s all good - and seems to be a good bargain. It works for me, but consider the above metrics yourself when making the decision.

Cons: I’ve looked and I’ve thought about the negatives, mostly I would be making stuff up if I list much. Unlike another review where the reviewer seems to have had access to active loads and such, I didn’t and kudos to him or her. But I have also thought that I see lots of reviews filled with specs that are often meaningless in the face of the question “Does the product do what it was intended to do well”. My answer would be within everything I can see, and test, is yes. The only thing I can’t find out about the supply is much about input suppression and output protection on the outputs.. for example it’s nice to know that if something shorts the 12V supply to +3V that the supply will shut down. It’s not clear if it has such protection though in fairness, most consumer power supply makers often don’t mention lots of the facts about crowbar or fold back, or constant current protection. So I just don’t know.

Overall Review: If you were that “Green”, you may want to invest in a more power efficient processor as you would likely end up saving more power while using the same bronze supply and get a performance boost with the new technology. Think 120 W (older generations of I7 processors) to 35 W (current 8th generation processors).. a net 85 W of saving that far surpasses what you would save with the higher end power supply. It’s hard to argue that investment if you are working with limited resources. I personally find it a great supply for the money.

Pros: I’m an embedded SW developer and without mentioning names I have some really large and heavy laptops with high end processors, configured with large amounts of DRAM, DVDs, Docking stations, dual SSDs etc. I spend most of my time running Windows with VM running various distros of Linux – which is what I develop with most of the time. I readily admit hauling one of my bulky PCs around is like moving a bag of cement. It’s hard to walk a straight line due to bulk when carrying them. When I saw this I thought it would be nice, but I had no idea how nice. It seems almost weightless, I have tablets that weigh more than this. I was even more impressed when I saw the display, bright and crisp. One of my laptops has a display of twice the resolution which seriously doesn’t look as nice. With the large touch screen you can move onto the screen and type and use it like a tablet. I connected to my WiFi (802.11ac) and did some speed tests, it outperformed everything I have ever tested here and the signal strength was 5 bars when my other laptops were typically down slightly from there. The WiFi and Bluetooth is rock solid and impressive. The processor is bleeding fast clocking up to ~4Ghz yet using between 15-28W (If I’m reading the spec correctly) to be able to keep it powered for what seems like an eternity (~16H), compared to my other laptops which are good for about 2-4 hours. It’s only about 20% slower than a 30lb 6 processor Intel workstation I use for machine learning which is very processor intensive! I was streaming Netflix and it is well worth mentioning for such a very small and lightweight laptop, it had surprisingly good sound, awesome picture and with the battery life you could binge watch an entire series while flying across the country uninterrupted. The setup with Win10 an iPhone went flawlessly except for when it came to the finger print recognition for login function, the fault was mine as I couldn’t find the place to put your finger (sounds funny I know – especially coming from a former hardware engineer and now a software engineer). Note to self, check the manual first. It’s on the power button. I know that 90% of people do not need a laptop to do what I need it to do, and after thinking about this I became more aware that I would be far from suffering if I was to use this as a development station with a few external extras. It’s as light as carrying a magazine and from the specs appears to be very, very rugged as it passes mil-std testing passing being dropped 26 times from about 4 feet. For personal use, entertainment, business, this is a very, very, impressive machine. It has an Illuminated keyboard, camera, basically everything top shelf.

Cons: • I had one Blue Screen of Death when I was in System Settings and trying to change a parameter and hit cancel in the middle of the operation. Honestly, I don’t think it had anything to do with the computer but a bug in the O.S., fair disclosure I tell everything. • If I was to use it for development, I would have to bump up the DRAM and the SSD sizes. As my use isn’t the target for the demographics they are looking at, it’s probably fine for the vast majority of users.

Overall Review: • Because the size is so compact there is no room for a DVD Drive (considered obsolete hardware to many, but still necessary to others). There are of course many very small external DVD drives on the market. • No Docking station ability. Again, when you see the size and thickness, you realize that this isn’t physically possible. I could survive without that but I would probably have appreciated a second HDMI connector in place of that as like many people I like running dual monitors.

Pros: I got this drive and put it to work immediately. I ran CrystalDiskMark 5.2.2 against this drive and a Kingston and a Samsung SSD, all purchased new within the last 12 months. Result? A small difference in numbers, each of the 3 drives was slightly better (usually under 1%) in one category than the other. Close enough where I can't conceive of a circumstance where anyone could reasonably find one "superior" enough over the other. I set it up as separate storage for VM (Virtual Machines) running under my windows 7 box with the VMs running Linux which I develop on for an average of 8-10 hour a day 5 days a week (yeah.. I have a life off of my computer on the weekends). The average size of my VM drives are about 50GBs, so I keep archival backups so that if I crash the one I am working on, I am not set back far. For safety about once a week I copy one off the drive. So far it's hugely solid, no unexplained crashes or other issues.

Cons: So why missing one star? I compared the MTBF and warranty to what I could find on the other two drives. The MTBF I don't worry about too much as I have worked in the industry and I know it can be gamed to some extent. The warranty however is a truer reflection in the confidence a company has in it's product as it is a direct "Cost" given that the company knows that a given amount of drives will fail. The longer that warranty is the more costly to the company. So if you found two nearly identical products and one had a longer warranty, it would likely be a more honest reflection of the product. WD has a 3 year warranty on their drive and another company has a 5 year warranty on their drive that is near identical in size/cost/performance. It is hard to tell however if a company is willing to relinquish more profits on a per unit sale for greater sales in volume, which in the long run make and keep you a market leader. What I'm saying is that why warranty is a good indicator, it doesn't necessarily indicate a superior product - though it directly benefits the customer to a greater extent.

Overall Review: As I used to write test code for an SSD manufacture (none of the companies mentioned - and haven't worked for them in 7 years, I had some insider knowledge that isn't common knowledge. The most important can be reflected in the following statement. There isn't much difference in the qualities of the leading brands. Mostly look at the things that might be the most important to you rather that is the migration software, warranty period, status of the brand name, or the design of the case. I would end by saying this appears to be a high quality product, worthy of consideration.

Pros: It wasn’t apparent to me just how unique this product is until I set it up and ran it, it’s not just another WiFi modem – it offers something I have until now been unable to find – the full bandwidth of my ISP’s access through all 3 floors and across my house. The setup I put into place for which I’m writing this review was probably a bit non-standard, but exactly what I needed so I want to explain it. I tested with two Velops (AC4400) WHW0302 using the Android App version 2.1.4.2011662 and Velop FW Version 1.1.1177892. Unlike what I had read from another reviewer, I thought the application was stable and solid and easy to setup. As a SW engineer who has worked on telecom and consumer products I would emphatically state that it was definitely not an alpha version product, the revision numbers may also back that up. I didn’t replace my exiting router which was also a Linksys MU-MIMO box, but plugged the Velop into the RJ45 jacks of that router. The reason for this is that up on the top floor of my home my wife’s PC and a couple of RoKus routinely lose connection so I thought this would be a really good test to see if I could get a solid signal between the two Velops. So between the three routers I had my original Wi-Fi router in the basement with Ethernet cable running from the switched output on the back to the first Velop the first floor connected via Ethernet (which had previously been fairly solid) to a second Velop on the second floor (where PC and Roku connections have been intermittent). I physically plugged the Velop Ethernet into the Ethernet connector of the PC and turned off the PC’s Wi-Fi. With the Wi-Fi I had gotten on average with speakeasy speedtest ~5-10Mbps and once connected directly to the Velop (connected wirelessly to other Velop downstairs) was solidly hitting max that my cable provider would provide ~55-65Mbps, a phenomenal speed jump. This is the same speed I get when I plug my laptop directly into the back of my cable modem in the basement 3 floors down on the other side of the house – the full speed provided to me by my ISP. I also connected wirelessly to my Samsung Galaxy 6+ Edge plus (802.11ac MiMo) and got the same result in a room previously starved for WiFi. Rather wireless or wired made no difference; the whole capacity of the line was available. The RoKu in the room was connected and has since run completely seamlessly with no problems for several days and the PC is blazing as well as cellphone Wi-Fi, etc. My reaction.. WOW.

Cons: No web interface, the IP it sets for itself is 90.171.1.1 (different than most routers of 192.168.1.1) and when I pointed my web browser at that page it just had a graphic that said to go get the app to manage it. Personally I prefer webpage management because it is agnostic and you can use a windows PC, Linux box, MAC, tablet of any type to manage it rather than a tiny screened mouse less interface of my Android. Other complaint is that the guest network requires a password. I find this obnoxious as it half defeats the purpose of a guest network. It should be a choice; somehow security “experts” and marketing people have arrived at the conclusion that they need to force me into creating a password. I live in the boondocks hundreds of yards from my neighbor, I don’t care who uses my bandwidth if they are actually close enough to get it – and yes I realize the liabilities – I just don’t care and think it should be my choice. If I choose to leave the keys in my car in my driveway that’s a risk I choose to assume. Brick power supplies are unwieldy but as someone who previously worked at several telecom and consumer audio companies, I realize it’s a way to make the product cheaper for the customer. As this system is worth every dollar in my opinion, it isn’t cheap. It lacks a few of the features of a fuller featured standalone Wi-Fi cable modem such as 5 port switch, online storage capabilities, etc. These I think were wisely sacrificed to deliver something unique for a price a consumer would find worth it.

Overall Review: For the last decade I have been looking for a system to do what this does (Full speed connection between two nodes on opposite sides and different floors of my house). For me, I bury all my little gripes about everything else and get something unique and really, really works. Just connect a small 5 port switch on the output of both of the Velops and you have any of my (real) gripes addressed. I've given several bad product reviews when warranted over the years, Newegg is really good about that. There is only a request for honest reviews. This is sincere, I’ve just been so blown away by the performance, in the big scheme of things none of the cons matter to me. Until there are competitive mesh networks at this level of performance for consumer prices for me this is heaven. If you have a 2 bedroom 600 SQ foot apartment, you don’t need this, but if you have a 2000-3000+ SQ foot home you’ll probably find this higher on your Maslow’s hierarchy chart than your need for a garage (or refrigerator, or stove). For this reason I give it 5 stars.