Pros: Fast, reasonably priced, gigbit ethernet, nice build quality and attractive package. I purchased 2 of these units for file sharing in an Active Directory environment to allow various AD groups to be able to easily share documents. None of the content is particularly critical or sensitive. Nonetheless, I assumed I would be able to restrict access based on AD group membership.

Cons: Remember what happens when you ASSUME. Active Directory support is useless. By default, everyone has read/write access to a shared folder. If left in the default mode you can only restrict user or group by giving them "read" access. Yup, there's no way to deny someone from having read access. The second option is to give the shared folder "read" access and add AD users or groups and give them "read/write" access. Again, no way to deny access. I can't think of many scenearios where I'd want all of the users on my network to have read access to all folders. Subtract 4 stars. Then, there's the documention. I didn't expect much here but the docs are worse than I expected. Subtract one star, which technically leaves us at 0 stars.

Overall Review: So close... Buffalo, if you're listening: this *could* be an awesome device if it had real "Active Directory Support"

Pros: Cheap, low power consumption, big

Cons: If you're considering this drive for a RAID5 solution you'd be wise to look for other non WD Green offerings. WD has disabled TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) on the latest crop of it's green drives. Why is this important? TLER prevents the drive from spending excessive periods of time trying to correct sector errors. Without TLER a drive can appear unresponsive to the RAID controller causing it to drop the drive from the array assuming the drive has failed. And while WD has been turning off TLER on other Green drives such as the EADS family it was a simple matter of enable the feature in firmware. Not so with the EARS drives. WD has permanently disabled TLER. I purchased 6 of these to use in an 8 bay external enclosure with a RocketRaid 2314. I've had a number of instances with the RocketRaid starts dropping drives from the array. Luckily, the drives reappear after a reboot but the problem triggers a verify operation that takes 16+ hours to complete.

I wasn't bad enough that my order was never shipped or that it took them 2 days to respond that they were reshipping the product or that the reshipped order had the wring items. The icing on the cake is that 3 days after letting them know that I received the wrong items I still haven't received a reply. Just what you're looking for in a vendor when Christmas shopping. One star is generous--I would have given them ZERO stars if that were possible.