Pros: Read speeds over 100 MB/s. Speedy "burst" write speeds, but only for small write tasks. See Other.

Cons: Very slow random write speeds - dips down to 10 MB/s or worse for large transfers even with write caching. Cheap plastic case with little ventilation.

Overall Review: I purchased a bunch of these over the past two years and they've been running nearly 24/7 with no issues. Hard drive failures do happen from defects, but this is rare. Far more often heat is the killer. If you do not have an active cooling solution for this drive while writing to it for an extended period of time, then it will either disconnect from your system and require a restart or the drive will fry itself. I highly recommend doing the following before writing any important data onto the drive: 1. Hook up the drive and turn on disk write caching in Windows disk management. 2. Place the drive on its side and point a fan into the bottom vents. 3. Do a FULL format on the drive with the highest allocation unit size. If disk write caching is off then your write speeds can plummet to 10 MB/s or worse. The full format will take nearly an entire day to complete, but if the hard drive is defective then there's a good chance it will fail the full format or your subsequent file transfer, in which case you return it and get a new one. Having a fan blowing into the vents while writing to the disk all day is MANDATORY. Make sure the disk is reporting temperatures no higher than 50C or you will have problems. These enclosures used to come with Seagate Archive drives in them, but that changed to Seagate Barracuda Compute drives in the summer of 2017. Both drives use SMR technology rather than traditional PMR, which is why the random write speeds are so awful. The newer Barracuda Compute drives have improved SMR with additional caching that allows them to sustain longer "burst" write speeds to help offset the poor random write performance, but this only lasts a few minutes at best. In short, sequential writes to the drive are nice and speedy (100+ MB/s) provided you have active cooling. Random writes should only be done in short bursts or avoided altogether. The drive is also a good economical choice for mining hard drive based cryptocurrencies like Burstcoin.

Pros: Lots of space. Does not use SMR. Fast: 7200RPM with big cache. Over 180MB/s on large sequential writes.

Cons: SC60 firmware is bad.

Overall Review: I bought two of these to mine Burstcoin about two months ago and one of them began to slow down recently. I used CrystalDiskInfo to check the SMART data on the drives and found the one with SC60 firmware was starting to fail, so it is currently in for RMA. The one with SC61 firmware is still doing fine.

Pros: Low price for an Ivy Bridge Intel Quad Core. Supports AVX and USB 3.0 with four ports on the back. Room to add another 4 GB of RAM or more. Room for a low profile graphics card like a GT 1030. Windows 10 Pro 64-bit key. Mouse and keyboard are actually decent for being cheap-o extras.

Cons: Hard drive is slow, low capacity, and used. Works well as a doorstop. Some cosmetic damage but meh, it is B-grade. Came in a big box, but without much padding/protection.

Overall Review: You're going to want to crack this thing open and give it a good once-over before proceeding. You may discover an unsecured hard drive or some obnoxious stickers covering the rear ventilation. I added 4 GB of RAM, tossed the hard drive for an SSD, and replaced the CMOS battery as well. With that done, you will have a very decent workstation or general purpose PC at low cost. There's room for the SSD in the floppy drive bay if you really want to keep the doorstop as a storage/recovery drive. There's an extra SATA power plug for it too, but you'll need to grab a SATA cable. Buy cheap SATA cables from Coboc here on newegg. Don't buy expensive SATA cables.

Pros: Decent VRM for a mini-itx. Great BIOS with overclocking options for days. No RAM compatibility issues + easy overclock with XMP profile. More than a couple fan headers. Board layout is sensible making building a breeze. BIOS update was simple and ASRock keeps up with AGESA.

Cons: Could use a few more USB 3.0 or 3.1 ports.

Overall Review: The only real difference between this board and the AB350 variant is the Wifi module that comes with this board has a higher max throughput and a nicer antenna. If you don't plan to literally saturate your entire broadband connection over Wifi, then just get the AB350 and put the rest toward overpriced RAM or a GPU. A mini-itx board doesn't have the real-estate to take full advantage of the X370 chipset anyway unless you're going for bifurcation in which case you do what you do, bro. It would have been nice to see one of the HDMI ports replaced by two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports and maybe a display port stacked on top of the other HDMI port. I'm hard pressed to knock an egg off for that though since the board is quite solid as is and it's not like the I/O is a secret. The price is a bit steep, but I knew that going in and only got the X370 version because the AB350 was out of stock at the time (months ago).

Pros: Works well, reasonably priced. Metallic finish, seems sturdy. Drivers installed automatically with no issues on Win10.

Cons: Only USB 3.1 Gen 1, not Gen 2. I wish the cord was a bit longer or came with an optional extension. Obviously meant for a portable device.

Overall Review: This device is only USB 3.1 Gen 1, which maxes out at 5GBps. I could not find a hub for USB 3.1 Gen 2, so get on that, WavLink!

Pros: Easily the best CPU I have ever owned. Unbelievable amounts of power at a reasonable price. So why are you even reading reviews on this chip? You already know this chip blows away the overpriced and underperforming chips from Intel in the same categories. You already know this is an 8 core 16 thread chip with IPC on par with Haswell at a fraction of the price. You already know you can overclock this bad boy to 3.6GHz with no voltage increase or 3.8GHz with a slight voltage bump. You already know it doesn't have a useless iGPU tacked on like some other brands insist on doing... So the only reason you're here is because you can't decide between the 1700, 1700X or 1800X. Well my friend, that's easy, get the 1700. The other two are quite literally the same chip, assumedly binned and clocked a bit higher, but at a much higher price. Not worth it. Bump up the multiplier on this chip to 3600 in BIOS and you're done. Mine has been running at 80% load at 3.6GHz at stock voltage for four weeks straight while plotting 128TB worth of hard drives to mine Burstcoin with. No issues. 100% stable.

Cons: Hahahaha! Cons? What?

Overall Review: If you need an excuse to buy this processor, then look into mining Burstcoin. That was my excuse. I have no regrets.