Joined on 07/23/03
good and bad news

Pros: -speeds on benchmarks are 20% less than advertised -overall a usable drive durable speeds R/W of 350GBps -runs cool.
Cons: -likes light workloads and will hang up for 20-30 seconds at a time in long duration volume or large file copies. -drive features sparse and this is justified by the price.
Overall Review: overall as published but does hang up for long periods before resuming R/W operations if doing 100+ GB file copies or VM backups. Worth the cost though it does not perform as well as SAMSUNG 860 unit I have. only 160TBW total and you have to figure out how this is progressing by translating S.M.A.R.T. numbers in hex to decimal. Overall would recommend for light duty workstations but would avoid for servers.
excellent purchase for NAS usage

Pros: converting my raid 5 to raid 6 to assure against 2 simultaneous drive failures. Bought 4 of these. One was DOA and returned. Other three were tested to death for a week and no read or write errors on any f them. These are the 2.5M hr mean time between failure drives.... well worth the money and awaiting replacement for one drive. Usually, 299 each...got them for 99 each. letem fail. I'll just replace them and still be 2/3 ahead on the deal.
Cons: drive that was DOA got read errors while just coming online. would think these gross errors would be picked up by QA. regardless.....
Overall Review: if you have a SAN and need cheap drives that perform....then these are for you.
Product made Power supply exchange happen with no challenges

Pros: -modular power supply so no snaking cables leading from PS to motherboard -able to plug in motherboard cables without removing motherboard -replaced PS without having to even displace anything on motherboard if you have had a windows ERR 41 because of failed power supply...this is your answer -very quiet and lasted originally for 6 years
Cons: -none
Overall Review: Evermax is my goto power supply for all server rebuilds.
best 10G switch for soho

Pros: Killer switch at a killer price. Un-managed so no programming. Speeds are fantastic and it is hundreds less than any other true 10G switch. Best part is that is is easily integrated into a partial 1G network.
Cons: 10G cables are a bit of a hassle as connections are SPF
Overall Review: Have used this switch for 4 years and this is my second purchase. excellent value!
great cooler for Sandy Bridge up to 130W

Pros: Product has very quiet fan and kept the CPU at or below 140 degrees F 2 cpu motherboard was in the desktop case. upgraded from 80W to 130W processors with no issues whatsoever. kept it cool.
Cons: as advertised
Overall Review: perfect solution and economical solution to support cpu upgrade. Was able to upgrade a 1cpu MB with E5-2630 v2 80W up to two E5-2697 v2 130W without incident. CPU benchmark before was 2600 and after was 8600.....not bad.
beyond excellent as a io bottleneck solution!

Pros: I have two windows servers each with over 20 VMs. Had 2.5" SSD running at 560GBps write as my system drive and place where all VM images resided. Backups to Hard disk of the 1.2TB of all VM machines was taking 30 mins to do all drive exports. Was using VEEAM but continually had problems restoring (parity errors) so using VM export exclusively). VM exports now with the wd_black take 1 minute and throughput is 2600 MBps. Fantastic performance and price is only 2X what I had as a previous solution. I sleep better at night now.
Cons: -works as advertised and I love it. -if you don't have a see through case all you will get is some light pulsing out the back of your server against a wall.
Overall Review: I would recommend to others without reservation. A real SSD solution to a real problem.