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Karl D.

Karl D.

Joined on 12/19/04

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Product Reviews
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product reviews
  • 44
Most Favorable Review

For the price, not terrible... but read on....

HGST HUS726060ALA640 Ultrastar He6 (Helium Platform) 6TB 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5inch Internal Enterprise Hard Drive
HGST HUS726060ALA640 Ultrastar He6 (Helium Platform) 6TB 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5inch Internal Enterprise Hard Drive

Pros: Inexpensive for the capacity and speed. SMART data says not many power cycle counts. But, keep reading...

Cons: High hours (~33,000), so close to four years of use. Not a big deal provided everything else is ok, which so far it is.... maybe. Keep reading.... Definitely out of *factory* warranty given power-on hours, so your recourse is with the seller (their "3 year warranty" is with them; HGST is going to ignore you after a serial number check.) Has a GPT PARTITION TABLE AND DATA on it! It came out of a Windows system :-) No, I won't try to go through the data and an encrypted filesystem is going on it, but that's something to think about..... it was NOT wiped (not even the GPT partition table!) before shipment. SMART data *does* show unrecoverable errors some 10,000hrs in the past and the last extended test was aborted (in other words whoever "refurbished" this didn't run a full, long-length SMART self-test -- that typically takes 12+ hours to complete.) We'll see if I'm happy once I run this thing for a while..... exactly what "refurbished" means may be open to some debate here. I think I'd more-accurately call these disks "used" than "refurbished", but if they're operationally solid then that's fine. Let's just call things what they are, and in addition how about both an extended SMART self-test that passes *and* a wiped partition table (if not a secure erase) before they're shipped?

Overall Review: You can't update reviews here, so once posted, it's posted. Hopefully I don't wind up with a both a problem and a fight with the Marketplace seller -- we shall see.

Most Critical Review

A Must-Add, BUT...

areca ARC-6120-3 Controller Card Backup Battery
areca ARC-6120-3 Controller Card Backup Battery

Pros: Without this card you're only getting half of what your ARECA adapter can provide in terms of performance -- if that. This unit is not optional if you actually want the performance you paid for. While you CAN force writeback caching on the adapter without this installed, DON'T -- if the power goes off you will get silent data corruption. Therefore this is a must-have accessory.

Cons: It's utterly scandalous that there's no $20 (or even $40) battery-only replacement option, given that the battery is a plug-in. C'mon guys, over $100 for a replacement $5 lithium battery? I think not. But never fear, provided you can find a replacement with the requisite three wires (including sense), it fits, and you can solder it's replaceable. I've done it and it works. Yeah, perhaps "not recommended", but anyone who thinks I'm forking up over $100 for a $5 battery has rocks in their head. Change 'em out every couple of years so you know the capacity is good.

Overall Review: There's just no argument available for NOT buying one of these if you have an Areca adapter. The performance differences on writes are immense and there is no way around this purchase if you actually want the adapter to provide the performance you paid for. This really ought not be an optional accessory, but it is what it is.

Excellent for a second drive, or a (slightly) slower primary

Western Digital 2TB WD Blue SN5000 NVMe SSD, PCIe Gen 4.0, up to 5,150 MB/s Read Speeds Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) WDS200T4B0E
Western Digital 2TB WD Blue SN5000 NVMe SSD, PCIe Gen 4.0, up to 5,150 MB/s Read Speeds Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) WDS200T4B0E

Pros: Reasonably priced for the performance and storage level. Typical Gen4 performance (fast) on reads, cacheless has its good and bad side.

Overall Review: I'm using this as a "secondary" drive for video file storage, where it works extremely well and replaces what was spinning rust. Being DRAM-less it is not as fast as the DRAM-laden nVME drives, but its also cheaper because you don't need those components. If you're on a budget its a perfectly good alternative to the DRAM-included ones, but IMHO the delta in price has come down a lot in the last few years so I'll still pop for the small additional cash for the system device. However, for a secondary storage drive such as what I'm doing there's little or no real benefit to the extra cost of the "top" level drives, and in addition to the money there's also power consumption; the addition chips use more power of course. So as "data storage" where most I/O will be sequential and especially if they're large files IMHO these are an excellent choice.

In one of the sweet spots

Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Hard Drive 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s CMR 3.5" Internal HDD for RAID Network Attached Storage ST8000VN004-NE
Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Hard Drive 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s CMR 3.5" Internal HDD for RAID Network Attached Storage ST8000VN004-NE

Overall Review: The midrange of spinning capacity these days is in the 8-12Tb range although it is looking like the 20Tb units will be in the game here shortly. I've got a bunch of these in different capacities in use and like them quite a bit; no problems in terms of reliability or performance. Recommended.

Excellent test backplane

ALAMENGDA Open Computer Case,Two-way Server ATX Motherboard Tray Test Stand, Test bench, ATX Mid Tower
ALAMENGDA Open Computer Case,Two-way Server ATX Motherboard Tray Test Stand, Test bench, ATX Mid Tower

Overall Review: Just what the doctor ordered to putting a Mobo on a "test stand" and powering it up for various purposes. Inexpensive and does the job for such purposes.

The sweet spot for this generation

Intel Core i7-14700K - Core i7 14th Gen 20-Core (8P+12E) LGA 1700 125W Intel UHD Graphics 770 Processor - Boxed - BX8071514700K
Intel Core i7-14700K - Core i7 14th Gen 20-Core (8P+12E) LGA 1700 125W Intel UHD Graphics 770 Processor - Boxed - BX8071514700K

Pros: Idles VERY low on power consumption (single-digit wattage) yet has the power if you need it. For the price a reasonable level of performance.

Cons: Buy a good (e.g. Noctura) cooler -- this thing can and WILL go well beyond its placarded TDP when pressed, and if you don't have the cooling required its going to throttle.

Overall Review: The 14th Gen CPUs are somewhat of a mixed bag with many of them not really offering much from the previous generation (except a higher price, of course.) This one is in the sweet spot where you actually get something for the additional money, and in addition when not working hard the power consumption is extremely low, thus so is your power bill. I like it.

seller reviews
  • 1

All good!

Finding the exact series of the new Coffee Lake Xeon's you want can be tough -- these guys had the one I wanted, and it works as expected...

On-time
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Satisfactory
12/23/2019