Joined on 09/27/11
Excellent Performance and Endurance
Pros: Very fast: 160Mbytes/s+ bulk read and write; 4k+ small block writes/s. 500Tb+ written rated endurance.
Cons: Would be nice if the price were lower. If you need huge storage space (Tb) then these drives are not for you (unless you have infinite budget).
Overall Review: I bought one of these drives the week after they were available and installed it in a test server that has an Opteron 6128 and 64G memory. With the SSD the entire system fits nicely into a 14" deep 1U case and draws between 90 and 140W depending on workload. Performance is excellent : it would take a string of 15K SAS drives with a BBU/WBC controller to achieve similar performance to this tiny drive. We're planning to switch over our production servers to these SSDs once testing is complete.
Very noisy pump
Pros: Easy to install
Cons: Unacceptably noisy pump
Overall Review: I'm assuming I received a unit with a bad bearing since I don't see similar comments in the other reviews, but this thing is NOISY. One of the reasons I built with water cooling was to have low noise. I realized my new system had a very annoying fan noise and set to figure out which fan needed to be replaced. Imagine my surprise when I discover the noise is coming from the water pump.
Good picture, horrible sound
Pros: The only 28" tv on the market today.
Cons: The speakers in this tv are absolutely horrible.
Overall Review: Not like the poor sound you've heard before from other small enclosure devices. Oh no. It's like they took the speakers from a 2008 smart phone, stomped on them, then flushed them down the toilet. Then retrieved them from the septic tank and finally installed them in the tv. Very very very bad. Bad. You will either need to be deaf or attach external speakers, which thankfully is easy due to the provision of a headphone socket.
Won't work without ECC memory
Pros: Low power with decent memory capacity and virtualization.
Cons: Watch out for OSes that won't install due to EFI or USB3-only hardware.
Overall Review: Note that this motherboard absolutely needs ECC memory. That is to say : it will not work, at all (no video, no post, no beeps) if you fit a non-ECC module. Note further that at the time of writing Newegg does not sell ECC SO-DIMM memory. I used this part, which is available from other resellers : KVR13LSE9/8
Buggy Firmware
Pros: Low cost for a 24-port smart switch.
Cons: Doesn't work reliably. Very poor documentation.
Overall Review: We've run many of the older GS724 switches in our data centers for years with no problems. So when we needed to expand our network we bought a couple more. Unfortunately Netgear has a penchant for "upgrading" their products over time. So today the GS724 is "v3" and it appears is completely different to the older models we have been using. That is, the firmware is entirely new, and as you might expect, buggy. The Web UI is pretty awful : like something an inexperienced intern would have built. I could live with that but it gets worse : I was able to "brick" these switches just trying to configure ssl. That is, the switch is dead : not working as a switch, and not responding on the management interface. It took a "factory reset" to bring them back. The best I've been able to achieve regarding ssl is to be able to enable it, but the switches crash and reboot if you connect on port 443. For a low cost I don't expect Cisco functionality, but I do expect the product to work without crashing.