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Matthew C.

Matthew C.

Joined on 06/12/05

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 51
Most Favorable Review

Pretty fantastic backplane

Athena Power BP-15287SAC an 1 x 5.25" External Drive Bay to 8 x 2.5" SSD / HDD Hot-Swap SAS / SATA Backplane Module - Transfer Rate Up to 6 Gbps SAS (I, II) / SATA (I, II, III) - Drive Thickness Up to 7mm - OEM
Athena Power BP-15287SAC an 1 x 5.25" External Drive Bay to 8 x 2.5" SSD / HDD Hot-Swap SAS / SATA Backplane Module - Transfer Rate Up to 6 Gbps SAS (I, II) / SATA (I, II, III) - Drive Thickness Up to 7mm - OEM

Pros: Can't get cheaper than this at any density even close. Fan is small but not too loud. Hardware seems durable enough, and looks nice. Fitment is good.

Cons: Not sure if it's this module at fault (though I think it is), but the activity lights don't seem to work right. I'm running two of these with multiple different SATA controllers behind, and an array of different SSD installed, and the activity lights only seem to fire on two of the 16 drives. It's more than just annoying - an easy way to identify a drive is to dd from it to /dev/null while the array isn't in use and see which activity light comes on, but that doesn't work here. You can also gain information by watching activity lights during a scrub - say, which disks are slowest, or whether your btrfs array is balanced the way you want/expect.

Most Critical Review

Pain in the rear

HighPoint RocketRAID 2680 SGL PCI-Express x4 Low Profile SATA / SAS RAID Controller Card
HighPoint RocketRAID 2680 SGL PCI-Express x4 Low Profile SATA / SAS RAID Controller Card

Pros: Cheap, 8 ports on an 8x PCI-E means you get full SATA speed per port (or close enough to it).

Cons: A nightmare to get running on Linux.

Overall Review: I got this card working on Debian last year, and ran it just fine with kernels 3.2 through 3.16. The drivers page is here, you'll want the "Linux open source" driver (which looks like a binary blob to me). http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/cs-series_rr2600_download.htm The 4.0 kernel hit stretch recently, and I have not been able to get this card running again under that new kernel. So maybe they'll issue a new version of the driver, or maybe I was just doing something wrong. Either way, it has been a lot of work to keep this thing running under Linux, and I'm done. Port expanders ahoy.

It's ECC RAM

NEMIX RAM 16GB (1X16GB) DDR4 2133MHZ PC4-17000 2Rx8 1.2V 288-PIN ECC UDIMM Compatible with Samsung M391A2K43BB1-CPB
NEMIX RAM 16GB (1X16GB) DDR4 2133MHZ PC4-17000 2Rx8 1.2V 288-PIN ECC UDIMM Compatible with Samsung M391A2K43BB1-CPB

Overall Review: NEMIX rules Newegg, don't be suspicious. RAM problems are exceedingly rare in my experience, and this module does exactly what I wanted it to.

12/24/2023

Good drives with caveats

Seagate Exos X20 ST20000NM007D 20TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
Seagate Exos X20 ST20000NM007D 20TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Overall Review: Bought 3, price was unbeatable and the manufacturer thinks these are reliable drives, given the 5 year warranty they assigned them. But as others have said, the packaging was insufficient - the drives were stuffed into bubble wrap sleeves that were open on one long side, so the drive could bang around against the box on that side during shipping. That said, all the drives survived a full destructive 4-pass badblocks run and never had errors or reported anything suspicious in smartctl, so I've put them in use. Took a few days to transfer enough data to bring the btrfs raid5 (I know) array to 1/3 usage and still no issues. Also, the reason these drives are so cheap is because they're old stock. The date of manufacture on the drives I got was September 2022, which means I lost a year of warranty. I'm just a homegamer so I'm willing to take that hit for the price savings - actually calling in an HDD warranty is rare even though I've gone through dozens of drives, usually failures happen well after the warranty period. But in a professional environment I probably wouldn't use these drives.

12/24/2023

Good unit for Steam deck

1TB Micron 2400 M.2 2230 NVMe PCIe 4.0x4 SSD MTFDKBK1T0QFM-1BD1AABYYR
1TB Micron 2400 M.2 2230 NVMe PCIe 4.0x4 SSD MTFDKBK1T0QFM-1BD1AABYYR

Pros: Right price, form factor, capacity, trusted brand.

Overall Review: If you have the knowhow, the way to go on a Steam deck is to buy the lowest cost one, get a larger drive like this one, dd the old drive to the new, and expand the filesystem.

12/24/2023

Excellent server boot drive

Intel Optane SSD P1600X SSDPEK1A058GA01 M.2 2280 58GB PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe 3D XPoint Enterprise Solid State Disk
Intel Optane SSD P1600X SSDPEK1A058GA01 M.2 2280 58GB PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe 3D XPoint Enterprise Solid State Disk

Pros: - Lightning fast - Famed 3d xpoint reliability (RIP) - Dirt cheap

Cons: - 3d xpoint discontinued 😭

Overall Review: All my servers have little boot drives like this one - all they need is a small amount of fast, reliable storage. Wish these drives weren't going to go away soon.

12/24/2023