Samsung Original Standard Battery (2100mA) with NFC for Galaxy S3 III Mobile Phone

Samsung Original Standard Battery (2100mA) with NFC for Galaxy S3 III Mobile Phone..

Special Price Samsung Original Standard Battery (2100mA) with NFC for Galaxy S3 III Mobile Phone By Samsung

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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Good battery
By jagsfangrandma
My galaxy 3s was having difficulty holding a charge and I was charging 2-3 times a day as within hours (without even using the phone) the battery was down from 100% to critical level. So bought this and works like a charm - just like when the phone was new.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Not all of these are genuine
By Yu-jin Chia
First, there are a lot of fake/reject Samsung standard batteries out there. A lot of these can be weeded out by looking at price: if it's under $10 it's probably not genuine/new. I've gotten generic non-NFC spare batteries for that much, but that's a different story. I wanted some extra batteries with NFC support and decided to try my luck here.

I bought one of these from PacificCellularDistributor. It was from this same listing and only $2 cheaper than the current price, which is discounted from MSRP but is still reasonably (i.e. believably) close.

When I got the battery I noticed it didn't fit perfectly in my S3. On closer inspection I noticed the top edge cover of the plastic housing seemed to be jutting out a bit, and lifting it with a fingernail caused it to peel away. That struck me as a bit unusual, but I figured it might have just been knocked loose in shipping and it didn't seem to be that serious. I seated the battery and used it for a whole day.

It did seem to charge to 100% and had good run time- as good as the stock battery. I was thinking this was the genuine article, but then I decided to test NFC. My wife has a Galaxy Victory that has NFC/S-beam support, and I know it works with the original battery. I checked to make sure the feature was enabled, tried it... nothing happened. I swapped it out with the original and it worked. Changed it back, still didn't work.

This is when I realized that this battery is either refurbished or fake. The sticker on it does look genuine, and it does say Near Field Communication on it, but NFC is either broken or was not present to begin with. It's possible this was an OEM battery that was damaged/defective and refurbished, but if so it's not a good item. No manufacturer refurbishes these things, which means someone else did it- and you don't want to be using a Li ion battery that a random (possibly amateur) person fixed. Not only may its performance be affected, but it's actually a potential hazard: these things can catch on fire if tampered with.

On the bright side, I pointed this out to the seller and they promptly refunded it. However, I'm sure they knew this to begin with and only did this because I caught them. I'm sure they've gotten away with it at other times when people didn't have the means or inclination to test the unit thoroughly.

Bottom line: you're taking a chance with these Amazon marketplace sellers. I'm pretty convinced now that the only way to be sure these batteries are genuine is to buy direct from Samsung or an authorized retailer. You pay a few bucks more, but it's worth knowing they're definitely the real article and not going to damage your device. Though technically 'free' as a result of the refund, I'm very reluctant to use this one and will probably only do so in an emergency.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
True OEM - not a knock off
By nothappy01
Yep, this seems to be the real deal Samsung Galaxy S3 OEM battery, not a knock of like some of the other retailers here on Amazon are selling. Looks and acts exactly like my original.

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PNY Attache III 32 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive (P-FD32GATT03-GE)

PNY Attache III 32 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive (P-FD32GATT03-GE)..

GET PNY Attache III 32 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive (P-FD32GATT03-GE) By Generic

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241 of 262 people found the following review helpful.
PNY 64GB USB Flash Drive
By Curious observer.....
Well I've been a loyal PNY product user for over 10 years, and I can honestly say, that their products have been reliable, functional, and have lasted the test of time. So as both of my 32GB flash drives approached maximum capacity, I found myself sifting through the web, in search of two 64GB replacements, at a reasonable price.

The price of memory is such a fickle thing theses days.... Much like buying a new car, what costs a fortune today, is worth just pennies tomorrow. Not wanting to pay a king's ransom, I managed to locate a distributer that was selling PNY 64GB Attaché USB Flash Drives for approximately $74 each. I bought two flash drives, from the merchant, and anxiously awaited their arrival.

When they showed up at my door, I found that PNY had made a few changes to their Attaché USB Flash Drive product line, since my last purchase.

1. The 64GB Flash Drives no longer have a LED activity indicator of any sort on the drive. I'm not quite sure how they expect anyone to know when their flash drive is being accessed. I, like many other users have come to expect, utilize, and some even require an activity light of some sort on their external devices. This omission was a major disappointment.

2. Over the years, I've found it necessary to reformat external storage devices, such as flash drives, and start fresh. This worked fine with both of my PNY 32GB Flash Drives, going all the way back to my first 256MB Flash Drive. Well this functionality has got an added rub with the 64GB Flash Drive. Apparently, the 64GB Flash Drive utilizes the exFAT system, which requires a patch/driver from Microsoft, before your Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 machine can `handle' the drive properly. Sort of pain, and no mention of this added requirement on the documentation or packaging the flash drive came in.

3. Lastly is the cheaper case & USB dust sleeve. The case is noticeably cheaper in heft. Seems like PNY elected to go with a cheaper grade of plastic, while at the same time updated their design to incorporate a capless dust sleeve. I say sleeve, since it clearly only protects the sides of the USB plug, but not the connections on the end - the most important part of the drive! They undoubtedly chose this course, like many other manufacturers, to eliminate the problem of lost flash drive caps. A capless system would be fine, if the connections of the USB Plug were afforded some degree of protection.

While it may sound like I've blasted the PNY 64GB Flash Drive, it still has its place. However, the short comings of the new design - no LED activity indicator, cheaper case, and only partial protection for the USB Plug do affect its versatility & reliability; especially if it's used as a daily worker.

A decent Case Logic case, would be a good & highly recommended compliment, to the transport & integrity of this flash drive. At the very least, it would give the USB Plug some much needed protection, while prolonging the life of the flash drive.

81 of 90 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent
By Greg J. Lovern
I picked this up at Fry's after my Lexar JumpDrive TwistTurn's hinges broke. Previously, I had used a couple generations of SanDisk Cruzers until they recently changed to a dumb design and became very slow.

What I've always wanted in a USB flashdrive is a good, strong keyring attachment and a non-removable cap. This PNY Attache has both.

It's also more compact than the Lexar JumpDrive TwistTurn and the SanDisk Cruzer.

It doesn't have a LED to light up when it's connected, but that's fine with me.

The sliding cap can be a bit stubborn; avoid it if you have weak hands or arthritis.

One reviewer here noted that the cap doesn't protect it from dust etc. falling into the plug. True enough, but that's not the point. The point is to prevent the end of the plug from being BENT. And it's good for that. The SanDisk Cruzer is the same way, and I never had any trouble with any pocket dust that got into the plug. If any does get in you can just blow it out.

UPDATE:

I've noticed that if the computer goes to sleep and then wakes up, I have to remove and reinsert it; otherwise the computer just sits there and seems to wait for it to respond. I didn't have that problem with the SanDisk Cruzer or the Lexar JumpDrive TwistTurn. It's annoying but I can live with it.

51 of 59 people found the following review helpful.
Bloody Useless
By Pitchy
Had the drive for about a week and now it's useless. The drive has went into a "write protect" mode and magically added about 20gb of phantom data that does not exist. I have 6 files on there and the largest one is 2.6gb. So there is no way I have 47gb in use, even though when I check the properties and I only have 9.1gb used. The reviews here don't talk about it, but if you google PNY WRITE PROTECT you will find tons and tons of people with the same issue. Best Buy reviews all talk about it.

I have two 32gb PNY drives that work great, but this one sucks. I have tried everything I can think of to correct this problem. I will most likely have to return it to either Amazon or PNY. Either way, this WRITE PROTECT problem seems very wide spread so I would look at other drives. Probably a reason why this 64gb drive is cheaper than most 32gb drives.

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HGST Travelstar 7K1000 2.5-Inch 1TB 7200 RPM SATA III 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0J22423

HGST Travelstar 7K1000 2.5-Inch 1TB 7200 RPM SATA III 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0J22423..

Special Price HGST Travelstar 7K1000 2.5-Inch 1TB 7200 RPM SATA III 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0J22423 By HGST

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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
Works with PS4 upgrading is easy and fast - Less than 30 minutes.
By Chuck Bittner
If you're someone like me and wants to upgrade their PlayStation 4 from its 500GB hard drive to something more spacious this drive is a good choice. With PlayStation 4 games weighing in at near 30GB+ for a lot of games and hard drive the size will eventually be a must upgrade. And if you're interested in upgrading your PlayStation hard drive it's a pretty straightforward process.

At the time of this review this 7200rpm drive was $10 cheaper: This is 7200rpm 1TB drive: HGST Travelstar 2.5-Inch 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6GB/s 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive

UPGRADING YOUR PS4 TAKE LESS THAN 30 minutes - You need to download the firmware from Sony*. If you need better instructions just google "PS4 hard drive replacement"
Step 1: remove the gloss section of your PS4. It's the part above the Blu-Ray slot.
Step 2: Remove the 500gb drive (requires 1 screw to be removed) Unscrew the 4 screws holding the drive in the cage.
Step 3: Put the PS4 back together.
Step 4: Insert your usb flash drive into the PS4 usb slot.
Step 5: Press and hold the power button on the PS4 for 8-10 seconds.
Step 6: Choose the bottom selection (I believe it's number 10) Reinstall firmware.
Step 7: That's it you are done only about 30 minutes and done.

*One thing you need if you're replacing a hard drive on the PlayStation is the latest firmware update from Sony's website and you need a 1 GB plus thumb drive formatted in fat32. And you just set up your thumb drive with a folder called PS4 an inside that folder another one called UPDATE. Then inside the update folder you place the firmware.

If you have a questions just ask them and I'll try to help.

I'd get this external case for your old 500gb drive: Vantec NexStar TX 2.5-Inch SATA to USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure ATM it' only $7.00. Takes only 3 minutes to install.

Here is another drive to consider for your PS4:
This is a 1.5TB hard drive: HGST Travelstar 5K1500 1.5TB 2.5-Inch Mobile 5400 RPM 9.5mm Internal Bare Hard Disk Drive 0J28001

Thanks reading please like if this was useful so others can see it.

PS personally I went with a 1TB 72000rpm drive in my PS4 as I wanted faster load times for my ADD personality.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
HGST 7K1000 1TB 2.5 9MM Laptop Hard Drive.
By ToeKnee
In and out in less than 2 minutes. What a difference as second drive on HP DV7 I7!

Replaced 5400 WD Scopro Blue and HGST 7K1000 1TB is now the second drive to Intel SSD 180GB drive with 6 TB of Hitachi Touro USB 3.0 Externals.... 16GB RAM.

Using KeepAliveHD to stop all of the hard drives and partition from going to sleep all of the time. Nothing else worked as everytime an update came it would revert to sleepy sleep.

HGST are now the premiere drives with dual platters, 7200 rpms. MAKE SURE you are getting the 7K1000 as the other HGST 2.5 inch 1TB drive is single platter and no where near as fast and they are dumping them at $10 less.... still a good drive but nothing like the 7K1000.

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
Click Click Click
By Ben Holt
Attracted by the price, speed and capacity, I bought this hard drive (model # 0S03563) to replace the 500gb 5400rpm Seagate drive that came with my mid-2009 13" MacBook Pro. It fits perfectly, and installing a fresh copy of Mountain Lion was a breeze. My laptop boots up and launches applications faster than before. While the hard drive is seeking and working hard reading and writing, it's nearly silent. However, when the hard drive is idle, it emits a very annoying click once every 3-10 seconds that sounds like metal slapping against metal. The stock hard drive did not do this. This may not bother some people, but for me it's so irritating and frustrating that I have a hard time concentrating on what I'm doing. I have done some online research and found that many other owners of Travelstars experience this same problem. If I had known this before buying, I would have chosen a different brand.

Update January 17th 2014:

I found a small, free program called "hdpam" that made my hard drive stop clicking. I don't know who deserves more blame; Apple's Mac OS for asking the hard drive to park its heads every few seconds or Hitachi for building the hard drive in such a way that it makes a loud noise when it parks its heads.

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Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive SH103S3/120G

Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive SH103S3/120G..

Buy Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive SH103S3/120G By Kingston

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108 of 113 people found the following review helpful.
Tool Box could be better. Update 11/05/2013: Still reliable after 1 year.
By MoJo In New Orleans
Thank you Amazon for the very quick delivery.

I have been noticing that a lot of SSD vendors ship out their products in nothing more than a hard plastic shell, not Kingston. The Hyper 3k comes packaged with a nice box. The SSD and the 3.5" adapter and screws are held snugly in place by dense foam. As this is a bare drive, there are no software or sata cable provided. However, sata cables are cheap and software to clone your old drive to your new SSD can be downloaded for free from various software companies.

I'm sure you all are aware that SSDs are fast, really fast when compared to HDD. This Hyper 3k is no exception. To maximize the speed of this SSD make sure you run it in AHCI mode and not IDE mode. It is very comparable to my girlfriend's Samsung 830 speedwise. It is also built, in my opinion, a little sturdier than the Samsung. It seems a little heavier and the header where you plug in the power and sata is much, much better than the Samsung. With the Samsung when you try to disconnect the sata cable it almost feel as if the whole header will come off. The Samsung, however, has a much better toolbox called Samsung SSD Magician. The Samsung SSD Magician has features to optimize the OS, to do firmware update, to run benchmark, performance optimization, and secure erase. The Kingston SSD Toolbox, which must downloaded from Kingston website, only gives you Drive and Details. Details is useless, and Drive will tell you the model of your SSD and the firmware that came with your SSD. Kingston, you guys really need to give us a better toolbox. Visually, the toolbox looks like it was designed back in the 90's.

Firmware can not be updated via the Toolbox, you have to go to Kingston website and download it from there. Quite cumbersome. Also in order to update the firmware, you HAVE to be in AHCI mode. If you are in IDE mode, don't panic, there are quite a few tutorials on the web on how to change from IDE to AHCI by in the registry and reboot into bios to enable AHCI.

Good news for Windows 7 users, your SSD will be automatically be 4K aligned. What does that mean? It means you can clone or migrate your OS to the new SSD and not having to worried about doing the 4K alignment yourself.

For cloning my HDD to my Hyper 3k I used to programs, AOMEI partition Assistant 5.1 and Macrium Reflect 5. Both are free programs.
1. Install your SSD in the computer case but don't plug it in to the motherboard yet.

2. Uninstall any programs that you no longer used in your HDD, are haven't used in a long while, which means you are no longer using it:)

3. Defrag your HDD. What you are doing is trying to remove as much data as possible because the content that is left has to fit into
your new SSD.

4. Once it is smaller, launch AOMEI and shrink your drive. For example, you wean down the content of your 1TB drive to 150GB of data. Macrium Reflect will not be able to clone your drive because it still sees 1TB and will give you an error message that your source drive is bigger than you destination drive. With AOMEI you can shrink the PARTITION of you drive to 150GB. There is a tutorial on AOMEI's website. *you will have to reboot after AOMEI shrinks your partition*

5. After the reboot, power down your computer.

6. Plug your SSD to the motherboard with the sata cable and connect the sata power cable from your power supply to the SSD.

7. Turn on your computer and go disk management and initialize the unknown drive (your SSD). Once initialized, Windows will recognize your SSD and assigned a drive letter to it.

8. Launch Macrium reflect and click on clone my drive. It will show your HDD and SSD. All you have to do is drag the partitions down to the SSD. Most people will only have 2 partitions on the HDD.

9. Sit back, relax, this could take 30 minutes or more depending on how much data you have. I only had to clone 73GB so it took only 17 minutes.

10. After it's done, you will need to reboot.

11. Google how to enable AHCI mode and follow the steps (not long and complicated at all).

12. One more reboot and you are done.

Enjoy your new drive:)

Update 11/05/13: After 1 year of usage, this SSD is still as fast as the 1st day I installed it. It has proven to be very reliable. The Kingston HyperX 3K withstood 2 abrupt power failure and a lot, and I mean a lot, of writing cycles as I am constantly moving my steam games back and forth from SSD to my HDD. Toolbox still shows that my SSD's health is still 100%.

The Holiday season is here and if you are looking purchase a SSD for yourself or as a gift for someone else, I recommend that you consider this SSD (if the price is right).

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
Update your firmware!! (EDIT - this is no longer necessary, but firmware support has ended. See comments)
By Josh Hinnenkamp
My drive which shipped on October 15th, 2012 came with revision 501 (501ABBF0) firmware on it, which has been out-of-date since June. At this time, the latest revision is 503 (503ABBF0) which was released in August.

I had some difficulty updating the firmware to Rev 503. The Kingston firmware update utility (found at Kingston.com > Support > Drivers/Downloads > Solid-State Drives > HyperX SSD -- SH103S3 > Firmware Update) would not recognize the drive.

As it turns out, it was either a conflict with the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) software I had installed, or the Intel AHCI driver that installs with the Intel RST software. Once I uninstalled Intel RST, rebooted, and the generic AHCI driver was automatically installed in its place by Windows 7, the Kingston firmware update utility recognized the drive and successfully updated to revision 503.

Once the update was completed, the Kingston firmware update utility will recognize the drive with or without the Intel RST software and Intel AHCI driver installed. There must be an incompatibility with revision 501.

The Kingston firmware update utility will tell you your firmware revision number. Make sure to check it out first thing after you get your drive!

43 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
Good fast drive nice vs sale price w/ bracket but.....
By Stephen
Drive is a good cost performance pay off but...
sata and power connectors seems to be made of brittle plastic without any reinforcement of a surrounding housing. This makes it easy to tweak the connection a bit when installing in tighter cases for instance. After 3 unplugs entire plastic connector broke off inside power connector.

Lucky exposed copper prongs still still allowed me use what was left of the messed up connector, so I continue to use the drive.

If I was a complete noob I would probably just being flaming this drive. Admittedly I could have been a bit more careful had I known how delicate these connectors were. Never had this kind of issue with the untold amount drives I have swapped in my lifetime. I bought it on sale, so GREAT DEAL!, just be careful with those connectors. Maybe even apply some dielectric grease.

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WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX

WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX..

Special Price WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX By Western Digital

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1001 of 1090 people found the following review helpful.
Regular consumer drives in RAID are accident waiting to happen
By Gary E. Peterson
Here is a quote from a review at pcper.com

I'm going to let the cat out of the bag right here and now. Everyone's home RAID is likely an accident waiting to happen. If you're using regular consumer drives in a large array, there are some very simple (and likely) scenarios that can cause it to completely fail. I'm guilty of operating under this same false hope - I have an 8-drive array of 3TB WD Caviar Greens in a RAID-5. For those uninitiated, RAID-5 is where one drive worth of capacity is volunteered for use as parity data, which is distributed amongst all drives in the array. This trick allows for no data loss in the case where a single drive fails. The RAID controller can simply figure out the missing data by running the extra parity through the same formula that created it. This is called redundancy, but I propose that it's not.

Since I'm also guilty here with my huge array of Caviar Greens, let me also say that every few weeks I have a batch job that reads *all* data from that array. Why on earth would I need to occasionally and repeatedly read 21TB of data from something that should already be super reliable? Here's the failure scenario for what might happen to me if I didn't:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has a bad sector that cropped up a few months back. This has gone unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Since drive 1 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 1 and marks it offline.
* Array is now in degraded status with drive 1 marked as failed.
* User replaces drive 1. RAID controller initiates rebuild using parity data from the other drives.
* During rebuild, RAID controller encounters the bad sector on drive 3.
* Since drive 3 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 3 and marks it offline.
* Rebuild fails.

At this point the way forward varies from controller to controller, but the long and short of it is that the data is at extreme risk of loss. There are ways to get it all back (most likely without that one bad sector on drive 3), but none of them are particularly easy. Now you may be asking yourself how enterprises run huge RAIDs and don't see this sort of problem? The answer is Time Limited Error Recovery - where the hard drive assumes it is part of an array, assumes there is redundancy, and is not afraid to quickly tell the host controller that it just can't complete the current I/O request.

Here's how that scenario would have played out if the drives implemented some form of TLER:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has developed a bad sector several weeks ago. This went unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Drive 1 makes a few read attempts and then reports a CRC error to the RAID controller.
* The RAID controller maps out the bad sector, locating it elsewhere on the drive. The missing sector is rebuilt using parity data from the other drives in the array.
*Array continues normal operation, with the error added to its event log.

The above scenario is what would play out with an Areca RAID controller (I've verified this personally). Other controllers may behave differently. A controller unable to do a bad sector remap might have just marked drive 1 as bad, but the key is that the rebuild would be much less likely to fail as drive 3 would not drop completely offline once the controller ran into the additional bad sector. The moral of this story is that typical consumer grade drives have data error timeouts that are far longer than the drive offline timeout of typical RAID controllers, and without some form of TLER, two bad sectors (totaling 1024 bytes) is all that's required to put multiple terabytes of data in grave danger.

The Solution:
The solution should be simple - just get some drives with TLER. The problem is that until now those were prohibitively expensive. Enterprise drives have all sorts of added features like accelerometers and pressure sensors to compensate for sliding in and out of a server rack while operating, as well as dealing with rapid pressure changes that take place when the server room door opens and the forced air circulation takes a quick detour. Those features just aren't needed in that home NAS sitting on your bookshelf. What *is* needed is a WD Caviar Green that has TLER, and Western Digital delivers that in their new Red drives.

End quote and back to reviewer.
I've got 5 of these in a Synology DiskStation 5-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (DS1512+). It is really a sweet setup.

The Synology software has a S.M.A.R.T. test that can do surface scans to detect bad sectors. I have their Quick Test check every disk daily and the Extended Test set to automatically run on each of the 5 disks every weekend. (The Extended Test takes about 5 hours per disk so I separate the tests by 12 hours.)

96 of 104 people found the following review helpful.
Nice hard drives for NAS or storage server with RAID.
By T. Mccleary
If you're looking at this review, you're probably in the market for some honkin' big drives to stuff into a server or a NAS box. These Western Digital "Red" series drives are probably a total waste of money if you're planning to put them into a regular PC. If you're not doing a raid array of some kind, then save your money and buy the green or black series drives instead. If you're looking to set up a raid array of some sort, these are a bargain. They aren't the fastest drives, but they are rated to run 24x7 serving up data! Their 3 year warranty is above the current industry standard for consumer hard drives.

For my home-made FreeNAS (google it!) NAS/Server, I bought 5 WD Red drives from Adorama (purchased through Amazon) and 1 drive directly from Amazon.

The one drive from Amazon came very well packaged, double boxed in what looks like a WD cardboard box with a shock absorbing cradle. Very well packaged for shipment. Honestly, Amazon has been stellar for packaging boxes for shipment.

The 5 hard drives from Adorama came in a big box which 'clunked' when it was tilted. Opening the box revealed some big plastic pillow air strips, and 5 loose smaller boxes. Inside each of the smaller boxes was a few pillows and a factory bagged hard drive. There were not enough pillows in each box to securely cushion the hard drives against rattling around, so there's a high likelihood of damage in shipment. BAD SHIPPERS! NO DONUT!

Anyway, getting on to the performance of the drives... I'm running 6 drives in a ZFS RaidZ2 array. They are all controlled using an IBM M1015 PCIE 8x SATA 3 controller which has been flashed to be an HBA providing JBOD to the ZFS OS. That's a lotta acronyms! The speed of the array is quite fast... more than fast enough to saturate a gigabit network. I currently have about 5TB of data stored on the 10TB array.

On to the bad stuff...
One of the drives (I haven't checked the serial number to see which shipper it came from) is starting to give signs of premature failure after about 70 hours of operation. During a scrub of the data pool, drive DA5 is experiencing unreadable sectors. Luckily ZFS is able to calculate the correct values for the corrupted data, and is busily recreating the data onto another part of the drive. ZFS rocks for data reliability! If the drive does turn out to be bad, I have a WD Green 3TB drive that I can put into the array as a hot swap temporarily until the failed drive can be replaced. *UPDATE* The ZFS scrub just finished, and it repaired 1.53MB of data, with no data loss. Did I mention that ZFS rocks?

Warning/Advice about Data Storage:
Note 1: If you're going to be using these drives, or any data storage device for that matter, make sure that you take into account that these are highly fragile and delicate devices which can be easily damaged in shipment, or just plain up and fail when you least expect it. You really need to use some sort of redundant array of drives so that if one drive fails, your data doesn't vanish. In my case, the final configuration is going to be 6 drives in a RaidZ2 (dual parity striping), which means that my data stays intact and accessible even if 2 drives fail simultaneously. Also, there is going to be a 3TB Green drive as a hot spare that can take over for any failed drive in the array. With the hot-spare, my data can survive the loss of 3 drives without losing data (as long as the failures don't happen all at the same time).
Note 2: Always, always, always have a backup. In my case, I have two external 3TB USB3.0 drives which will be used only for backup purposes. Every so often, I'll backup the critical data onto the drives and stash them in my locker at work. If you don't have TrueCrypt, google it and see why your backup removable drives should be using it. If someone steals the drives, they only get the drives and not my data.

I'm giving 5 stars for the drives that work... 1 star for the failing drive... averages to about 4 stars score! I'll update this review once I have details on how the drives do in a week or so. Currently it ain't looking too good for drive DA5!

139 of 160 people found the following review helpful.
NAS Best Friend
By Simon
After about six months of searching for the perfect drive, I finally settled on two of these Western Digital Red 2TB WD20EFRX hard drives. I was ready to purchase HGST enterprise drives, the former Hitachi, but WD came out with these drives just in-time. I wanted to get the 3TB WD30EFRX version for my Synology DS212 NAS, but the price difference didn't make that much of a sense, and 2TB drives are more than enough for a few years of my home office use. I am very happy that these drives MTBFs are rated at 1,000,000 hours, they use less power, and they are cheaper than other enterprise drives.

Upon receiving, I immediately installed them in my NAS. It took about 15 minutes to install DSM 4 and begin the inspection process. I neither chose Raid 1, JBOD, or SHR, and I took some online advice and created two separate volumes, one on each disk, to have two independent file systems. In this case, you don't have to worry about rebuilding disk arrays if any drives fail, and you always have a backup present. I was planning on using Folder Sync feature to sync all folders from Disk 1 to Disk 2 every other hour, but I found out this feature only works on two independent Synology Disk Stations; however, you can use automated backup feature to backup data from Disk 1 into Disk 2, and it produces about the same result as Folder Sync does, and it gives you a few more options for backing up system and application files as well.

Synology volume creation took about 7 hours for each drive with automatic bad sector reallocation feature. I later tested each drive with S.M.A.R.T extended test--each took about 4 hours--and I am happy to report that I did not have any bad sectors on either of the drives. That is, the "Reallocated Sector Count" reads zero in S.M.A.R.T report.

The drives are surprisingly quiet. I had an enterprise RE2 500GB in my NAS, and it was thunderstorm loud compared to these. The temperature is also very reasonable. When the drive is resting it is about 31C/88F, and under heavy usage it rises up to 35C/95F. Although these drives speed are only 5000 rpm, I don't see any difference in file transfer speed. The only downside that I could sense was the startup time from sleep. I feel that compared to my old WD RE2 drive, it takes a good 2 to 5 seconds more for the NAS to come out of sleep each time. Not a deal breaker, but something to consider when you invest in these drives.

I think WD has done a good job with these drives, and they are currently the best on the market for home or home office use. That being said, I still think WD RE4 drives are the best enterprise drives and ultimate in performance; however, if you are looking for a good set of drives for your NAS, and the power consumption and noise are important to you, these WD Red drives will work just fine. Compared to desktop drives, these come with a few enterprise features that come in handy and will save you some time and money down the road.

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HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664)

HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664)..

GET HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664) By HGST

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Works well enough
By Kyle Cronin
I bought four of these drives and put them into a Promise Pegasus2 R4 with RAID 5. With this setup I benchmark about 470 MB/s write and 360 MB/s read with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. These speeds are well in excess of the speeds you will be able to achieve with a NAS, the marketed purpose for the drives. Only time will tell whether these drives will be reliable, but with none DOA they're off to a good start.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Longest MBTF I could find
By Gadget Freak
Just what I was looking for, reliability. Obviously a 3-year warranty is a good indicator. The Deskstar NAS is a new product. It has the 1M MTBF vs. the regular Deskstar 7k4000 (HDS724040ALE640) which has a 0.8M MTBF. The NAS version also has a rotational stability sensor to help monitor the smart status better. I was looking for additional external storage for backups & videos. I installed 4 of these in an 4-bay external USB 3.0 enclosure (Dyconn Quartz 4). For around $1100 total installed cost, you can get nice 16Tb setup for all your "stuff". I've got mine connected to a MacMini. A good (non-SSD) 3.5" drive has about the same read/write speed as USB 3.0, thus in an external USB 3.0 setup, it will give you ~170-180 MB/s regardless of RAID setup.

Update #1
I was able to test drive speed vs various other drives. This drive performs as expected. I did not test in a RAID configuration. (sorry about the formatting, the last two nos. in each row are Read/Write in MB/s), all tests with BlackMagic

Mid--2011 Mac Mini
WD My Book Studio 4Tb, RAID 0 Firewire 800 800 megabit FW800 60 64
Apple 5400 rpm 750 Gb HD SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 68 68
Toshiba/Apple 5400 500 Gb Laptop drive SATA III 3 gigabit Thunderbolt 63 63
Crucial M4 - 256 Gb SATA III 5 gigabit Thunderbolt 382 79
HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit Thunderbolt 163 160 (Seagate BackupPlus thunderbolt adapter)

2012 Mac Mini Server
Samsung 840 SSD - 500 Gb SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 560 320
Samsung 840 SSD - 500 Gb x 2 - RAID 0 SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 990 620
Patriot Magnum 64 Gb USB 3.0 Memory Stick USB 3.0 4.8 gigabit USB 3.0 242 120
Transcend 64 Gb USB 3.0 ?? Memory Stick USB 3.0 4.8 gigabit USB 3.0 15 15
HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit USB 3.0 131 126 (Dyconn Quartz 4, JOBD)
HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit USB 3.0 163 160 (Anker Uspeed adapter)

Update #2; I just tested four of these drives in RAID5 mode on the 4-bay USB 3.0 Dyconn.... way better than expected 250 Mb/s Read, 241 Write. Woo Hoo! So, double the single drive mode.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
This thing is FAST
By Jeff Welch
Other than using an SSD, this is by far the fastest drive I have ever had, that said I purchased it for its size and reliability. Size is great, speed is awesome. The jury is out on reliability for me, maybe I'll revise this in two years!.

I like to retire my drives after a couple of years to head off reliability problems before they happen. I am in the process of using this drive to replace two 2TB drives from another manufacturer. I lost a drive on a laptop a few years ago and ever since I have become very paranoid about loosing my data (basically everything that I have made for close to 20 years, plus many movies, songs and pictures, I delete NOTHING).

If you have read a lot of Hard Drive reviews, you are probably more worried about which drive to pick now then when you started. After several weeks of research and reading, HGST seemed to me to be the best choice. Time will tell.

Assuming this drive works well over the next few months, I will purchase a second one and mirror them for data backup.

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Monoprice 18-Inch SATA III 6.0 Gbps Cable with Locking Latch and 1 x 90-Degree Plug (108783)

Monoprice 18-Inch SATA III 6.0 Gbps Cable with Locking Latch and 1 x 90-Degree Plug (108783)..

Buy Monoprice 18-Inch SATA III 6.0 Gbps Cable with Locking Latch and 1 x 90-Degree Plug (108783) By Monoprice

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69 of 72 people found the following review helpful.
Outrageous price
By Dave
These cables are currently $0.56 directly through monoprice, so if you're ordering more than one using Amazon Prime, you are getting taken.

I like Monoprice cables, and I like Amazon Prime, but this combination is not a good deal.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Great Product
By Don
I needed a couple of sata cables and came to my go to source, Amazon. When I saw the price of over $6 for one cable with Prime shipping I thought the price was a little high so I went to the Monoprice website and found them for fifty plus cents each. I ordered 10 for a little over $8 including shipping.

Prime isn't the great deal it used to be.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Need for my new MB and HD
By Tech Prof
My new motherboard did not come with 6.0 Gbps SATA 3 cables so I ordered two of these. They work as stated and the price was good.

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OtterBox Defender Series for Samsung Galaxy S III - Retail Packaging - Black

OtterBox Defender Series for Samsung Galaxy S III - Retail Packaging - Black..

Special Price OtterBox Defender Series for Samsung Galaxy S III - Retail Packaging - Black By OtterBox

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532 of 551 people found the following review helpful.
Good phone case; great fit, solid protection, but...
By Dean Buzzell
I just purchased a Galaxy S3, and wanted the cover that offered the best protection for my device. My kids have Otterbox Defenders for their iPhones; my sons is really beat up and literally falling to pieces, but the phone it protects is in excellent shape, without a scratch or mark. I chose this case because my last phone - a Blackberry Bold 9650 - got a deep scratch on the case and the screen the first month I had it, and it drove me crazy for two years. A good Otterbox cover like the Defender would have prevented both.

PROs
1. The cover DOES provide a very high degree of drop protection for my device. The hard inner shell has a soft inner cushion that stabilizes the device and increases the shock resistance slghtly.
2. The rubber-like outer covering fits snugly around the inner shell, and dramatically increases shock resistance.
3. The earbud and mini-USB ports at the top and bottom of the phone are covered by flexible 'tabs' that protect the device from dirt/dust/gunk intrusion.
4. The volume rocker and power button are completely encased. It takes just a bit more effort to press the buttons, but it is NOT difficult.
5. The cover comes with a built-in screen protector. It is a rigid plastic that does not adhere to the device screen like soft plastic does. This doesn't seem to affect the touch-screen sensitivity, though. Tip: be really careful to thoroughly clean the inside of the rigid screen protector. Check it before closing to ensure there are no particles adhered to it from static cling - these will leave noticable 'bumps' on your screen, and they COULD scratch the inner face of the screen protector or even your device screen. Have a can of compressed air handy and give both the screen protector and device screen a shot before closing it up.
6. The manufacturer tells you the included belt clip can double as a kick stand that can be adjusted to a variety of viewing angles. This is true, after you lock the clip into the open position. Be careful, though - the 'notch' that holds the clip in the open position is light plastic. It's not very easy to pry the plastic notch up to release the clip, and one could actually break it or the belt clip itself with a little too much force. If the kickstand thing is something you really want, consider purchasing a case with a REAL kick stand.
7. The case is designed to fit into the belt clip with the screen turned in toward your body, but will let the phone be inserted with the screen turned out if you choose.

CONs
1. VERY limited color choices; way fewer than the less expensive Commuter series covers.
2. The case is somewhat bulky. You consciously choose the high degree of protection over the ability to slip the device easily and inconspicuously into your pocket with this case.
3. The rubber tabs that cover the top and bottom ports (ear jack on top, mini-usb port on the bottom) are VERY difficult to open. I can predict with a high degree of certainty that they won't make it a year without being ripped off the cover. It's nice that they fit so snugly, but they are recessed so that one must use a tool to pry them out to access the port within. Let your thumbnail grow out a bit and you'll be all set.
4. Once inserted into the shell, the whole thing snaps into the belt clip with an audible 'CLICK'. This snap-in feature makes it just a little difficult to quickly remove the device from the clip to answer a call. Practice your quick-draw with the case in the belt clip.

The Otterbox Defender fits my Samsung Galaxy S3 like a glove. Everything lines up precisely, and, with the port covers closed, it offers an extremely high degree of protection for my device.

I'm not particularly pleased with the available color choices for the Defender series. I have the blue SGS3, and don't understand why I can't simply get a blue cover to match the phone. The closest I could get is the 'Atomic' color scheme - dark blue with neon green highlights. Yay. I don't like how difficult it is to open the ear jack port and mini-usb port covers; I firmly believe these will be torn off in six months or less from struggling to open them each time I want to recharge the phone or use ear buds. Once that occurs this case will allow dirt/gunk to accumulate inside the case on the phone or in the phone jacks it is supposed to protect. This is my biggest dislike of an otherwise excellent cover.

Based on the degree of shock resistance from this cover, the incredibly good fit, and precise alignment of holes and bumps, I give 5 stars. Due to the difficulty in opening the port covers and limited color availability, the cover is dinged 1 star. As long as you understand this cover is BULKY, and are REALLY careful and patient with the port covers you won't be disappointed.

Dean Buzzell

266 of 280 people found the following review helpful.
Awesome price for a great case
By J. Stevens
I have never liked cases much because they are so bulky and honestly, the way I handle my phones I don't need a case. I take very good care of my phones. Since the S3 is such an expensive phone (I paid full price) I decided to get a case. I did a lot of research and decided on either the defender or commuter series. The common complaint with the commuter series is that the back is slick and any time you toss is on something it slides right off. So I went with the defender series. Other reviews claim that it is bulky, I disagree. It adds a little thickness to the phone but really not all that much. It's still much slimmer than other phones out there such as an iphone. Another complaint stated that the glass on the case sat off the glass of the phone. I as well disagree with this. If the case is put on correctly you will have no gap between the case and phone. The case is very difficult to put on if you do not know what you are doing. The directions it comes with suck! On otterbox's website they have a video walking you through how to put it on. Following the video made it super easy and took like 2 minutes. This case retails for $60, honestly this is an amazing deal and a great case.

186 of 204 people found the following review helpful.
Worth the wait.
By C. Campbell
Otterbox was slow getting these out to the suppliers but it was worth the wait. I have been carrying my phone around for two weeks worried every moment about dropping the thing. I received the Otterbox Defender case yesterday and couldn't be happier with the product. It fits perfectly and looks great. All of the ports and buttons work well. The touch screen is responsive and clear. I especially love the way it feels in my hand. Before the phone felt thin and fragile, now with the cover on it feels very solid and strong. I am a business traveler and I am also pleased with the belt clip. I will be using the belt clip extensively as go through airports and security lines. I have researched all of the competing phone covers at the big box stores and online, it is pretty clear that Otterbox sets the standard that everybody else tries to live up to.

Update 2014: I still say this case provided great protection from drops. I just got tired of the loose silicone outer shell. I'm sure I was part of the reason the outer shell got so loose since I was frequently taking the phone out of the case to changes batteries. I have since moved on to a UAG case that I am happy with.

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Wasabi Power Battery (2-Pack) and Charger for Canon LP-E6 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 5D Mark III, EOS 6D, EOS 7D, EOS 60D, EOS 60Da, EOS 70D

Wasabi Power Battery (2-Pack) and Charger for Canon LP-E6 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 5D Mark III, EOS 6D, EOS 7D, EOS 60D, EOS 60Da, EOS 70D..

GET Wasabi Power Battery (2-Pack) and Charger for Canon LP-E6 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 5D Mark III, EOS 6D, EOS 7D, EOS 60D, EOS 60Da, EOS 70D By Wasabi Power

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61 of 65 people found the following review helpful.
No good decoding chip. Not recognized by 6D. Awesome customer service.
By Adam C. Joo
I've had some successful results with non OEM batteries in the past. Since lp-e6 format has been around for a long time I thought I'd give it a try. Just got the new 6D canon released. The battery is not recognized by the camera, BUT, it does work so I gave it at least the 2 stars. You just have to live with the empty battery meter. So it's not completely useless. I'll keep them as back up. Unfortunately, I have 4 of 'em. I'll try them in the battery grip pack, to see if that'll work.

EDIT #1 (2012DEC04). I actually got a call from one of the customer service rep within 24 hours of the post. They (WASABI) weren't aware of the compatibility problem with 6D due to being such new camera, i.e. battery hasn't been updated yet. According to the rep, they are aware of the problem and the compatible battery will be available in next 1-1.5 months. He offered to send a test battery to ensure compatibility with the new 6D when available. Now that's outstanding customer service (received a star bump today)! I will update once again when the new updated battery arrives and get to play with it. Possibly elevating more stars then. So for all you early adopters with a preordered 6D like myself, look to buy WASABI in Jan or Feb.

EDIT #2 (2012DEC17). The seller now updated the title to exclude 6D, so that should help. I've now been using these batteries daily 15 minutes to an hour or so exclusively on 6D for photos and videos. Again, everytime you put in these batteries the 6D asks if you want to continue with "irregular batteries". They seem to work fine but you don't know how much charge is left. So every 2-3 days I would replace the batteries and charge them. I have yet to run them dry to the point of shut off yet. So it's still useful.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
Great Quality, Super Value!
By Fun Dad Pete
This is such a great deal. I have had these batteries for almost 2 years and they have never given me any problems so I just got some more. They came charged between 60% and 80%, nice. They are rated at a higher mAH than the canon lp-e6 so they might last a little bit longer, I haven't done side by side testing. What I do notice is that these batteries function just like canon batteries. Some other non-OEM will not be this way, for example these Wasabi Power will give battery info in the camera and will charge on the canon charger. They are are reading full recharge performance in my camera's battery info after around 2 years of use.

The value is clear, for $32 you get prime shipping, 2 batteries 1 charger and 1 car cigarette lighter adapter for the charger and the foreign plug if you're going to Europe. a canon battery cost just about $58 here on amazon.

I advise doing what I did which was get two of these packages, which gives you 4 batteries and 2 car ready chargers for a few bucks more than one canon battery! I will probably buy more, you can never have too many batteries! It gives you peace of mind, especially shooting video to know that you are covered.

2 batteries in a battery grip on the Canon 7D gave me approx. 3.5hrs of continuous video recording at 1080p. so half that to get how much a single battery will approx. give you.

I have never had any problems but Wasabi Power says it will replace any non working batteries no charge within first 30 days and with only a shipping charge within the first 3 years.

Pros-

- good quality
- inexpensive
- functionally identical to OEM Canon battery
- may have longer run time than Canon Battery
- 3 year warranty

Cons-

-None

Summary-

This is the kind of modern product I really appreciate, essential for powering the camera, affordable and long lasting. The company says that their goal is for every customer to be 100% satisfied and I think that with this product that every customer will be.

It would be cool to see them make a multi battery charger, maybe a Quad?

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Worked well for about 5 months
By tagnal
So, at first, these batteries were great. At a fraction of the cost, they lasted longer than my OEM battery. After 5 months or so of use, they started not getting charged to 100% (according to the battery info menu in the camera). I was still able to get a good amount of use from each charge though so I didn't really pay it much notice. A few weeks after that, charging only got up to 73%-82%. Now, at 11 months, I am used to it only saying 73% after a charge. However, now when I use it, it goes from 73% to 40% normally, then suddenly drops to 0% or dead.

I was out shooting video on my 5D3 for a commercial and it died after 5 minutes. I had just charged all my batteries (these 2 wasabi ones and my OEM canon one) earlier that afternoon. I took maybe 15 stills with it, then we started using the camera for video recording. After 5 minutes, the camera just started shutting itself off. After a little troubleshooting, I noticed the dead battery light flashing. I didn't understand how that could be as this was a newly recharged battery. So, I pulled it out and used the Canon battery and it lasted perfectly fine for the next 3 hours. A few days later I recharged the wasabi battery and played around with it while sitting at my desk and was able to recreate the issue. I tried completely draining the battery as far as I can before recharging it several times. Hasn't improved. I think I'm giving up on these batteries.

Apparently they don't sell battery reconditioners for lp-e6 batteries so I can't try it on them to see if that would help.

It's too bad. These seemed like such wonderful batteries for the first 9 or so months. I have even recommended them to several people. Guess I have to bite my tongue now. I still don't believe in paying the insane prices for OEM batteries. For the amount of use I got out of it for the price I paid, it might be okay. But, I'll probably try a different brand next time first.

Update June 4, 2013
I started using the Wasabi charger to charge the Wasabi batteries exclusively and it seems to have helped a little. Both batteries are now back to working they way they did as I described above at the 11 month point. In comparison to the OEM battery, they now last 2/3rd's as long. Not so great considering my OEM is rated for 1800 mAh and these Wasabi ones are rated at 2600 mAh...

Something else to note, the wasabi batteries are specified as 7.2v, where as other batteries (ie STK) are 7.4v. So maybe as the battery is used and its voltage slowly drops, it goes below the minimum voltage threshold of the 5D3 even though there is still a good amount of power left sooner than the other batteries. *shrug* I did initially buy the Wasabi because it was 7.2v just like the Canon one though.

The most annoying thing about using these batteries in my 5D3 is the fact that once the battery charge indicator drops below 50%, the cameras FPS drops from 6 down to 3 or so. So every charge I get full performance from 73%-50%, then reduced performance from 49%-0%.

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