Joined on 11/06/05
USB 1.0 speeds
Pros: Pretty color.
Cons: Fastest sustained transfer rate was 9.54 Mbps. Toshiba laptop with intel i3 M380 2.53GHZ CPU. 4GB RAM installed. Windows 7 64-bit. Ran several copy / backup jobs to several USB 3.0 external drives. Confirmed hub was plugged into a USB 3.0 port. Disabled antivirus. Rebooted & tried again several times. Ran Diskcheck against all drives - no errors reported. Finally removed the hub and plugged drive into USB 3 port directly. Sustained speeds around 160Mbps. Problem is the hub!
disappointing lifespan
Pros: None
Cons: DROBO marked this drive as failing after 8 months / 5912 hours. Very disappointing lifespan. Paid a premium price for what was supposed to be a premium drive.
Overall Review: It's disappointing to see WD let the quality of their enterprise grade drives deteriorate. I service computers professionally. I replace a lot of hard drives. Based on research and experience, I thought this was one of the two most reliable drives available today - the other WD's Black series drives. Failing at 5912 hours is unacceptable. I've started replacing failing drives with Samsung SSD's where customers can afford it. The entire mechanical drive market has become too unreliable. If WD's enterprise grade drive is going to fail at 8 months / 5912 hours, I might as well replace it with a cheap drive. When 2TB SSD's become available/affordable, I'll replace all the drives in the DROBO with SSD's.
bad design
Pros: It seemed like a nice all in one for the price.
Cons: Clogged black print head after 10 weeks of light use (less than 250 pages total printed). Have only used Brother brand ink cartridges. Read in some forum that if you let an ink cartridge go completely empty in this model, it damages the print head. If that turns out to be true, I cannot stress strongly enough to not buy this printer. That was a HORRIBLE design decision. Whether or not it is true, a non-functional print head after 10 weeks of light use is completely unacceptable.
Overall Review: Brother makes some great printers. This is not one of them.
Occassionally Disconnects
Pros: Cheap
Cons: Disconnects from Internet occassionally while I'm using it - maybe once a day.
Overall Review: Not worth the price no matter how cheap if it won't maintain a consistent connection.
Difficult Installation - Card Failed After 3 Months
Pros: Good looking video when it works. Quick shipping and great customer service from Newegg as usual.
Cons: Difficult installation. Disabling antivirus software insufficient. Had to remove antivirus software, install video card drivers, and reinstall antivirus software. Both analogue & digital output on card stopped working after three months. Don't know if removing the card and drivers and antivirus software and reinstalling it all again will fix the problem or not. I'm MCSE & CNE certified and I work on hardware all day long. A video card shouldn't be this much trouble. I've already spent about 4 hours installing the card and I'm not willing to spend another couple hours trying to figure this problem out. Removed the card and am now looking for another one.