Intel Single Pack 400GB 750 Series Solid State Drive PCIE Full Height 3.0 20NM MLC 3.5" SSDPEDMW400G4X1

This is a pretty neat SSD. I'll just go ahead and get the con out of the way up front - to get the full speed potential out of this SSD I had to plug it into the 2nd GPU slot (16x PCIe) on my motherboard. My motherboard is an MSI Z170 Gaming M3. This means that, with this SSD installed, I can no longer install two AMD graphics cards in CrossFire onto this motherboard. Not that I was or am currently planning on doing that, I'm just pointing it out for other users.Install was a bit of a...process...to say the least. The physical "get it in there" part was easy - treat it like a small graphics card and you'll be fine. The hard parts comes when you go to actually set the thing up in software. First off, device manager was not recognizing the SSD at all. I had to find the proper drivers off the Intel website and boy oh boy do they need to take a look at how they organize their drivers' webpage - ended up downloading three different things before I finally found what I needed. Once Windows was able to "see" the SSD it was business as usual getting it set up as a usable drive. Since then I've been using it as my main gaming storage device and have noticed a very nice decrease in loading times compared to a WD Blue 1 TB HDD I was using prior to this.It is pretty fast, like probably a whole lot faster than what I actually need it for in all honesty but hey, couldn't pass up a low cost refurbished model. It does have a very interesting "quirk," it actually gets faster the longer it works (say downloading a large game off Steam) which to me is counter-intuitive since its getting hotter the longer it works and don't most computer parts slow down the hotter they get? (i.e. GPU/CPU?) It acts like it has to warm up like a car engine in the winter before it will run at full bore. WEIRD, am I right? But hey, this thing is supposed to the future of storage and all that jazz so if your a fan of speed, 0 cables and your willing to give up a 16x slot (actual slot used will vary motherboard to motherboard) then yeah, try to find one of these on sale. I'm sure the price will come down now that Samsung has released their 960 series M.2's.

I just brought the drive recently, so cannot really comment on the long term.Pros: The performance is decent and an improvement over my Intel 540's. The build seems strudy. There are LED lights that inform the status of the drive.Cons: it's a time consuming process to install, especially if you are doing this for the first time. You cannot clone your OS/ HDD/ SDD content from your older drive - this is the biggest disadvantage.

Device works well. It is installed in an Asus Rampage IV Extreme x79 board with an Intel 2011 I7-3930K processor, overclocked to 4.5Ghz. Ever so slight drop in performance due to the limitations of Intel X79 chipset. However that is not a con as I knew it would be a bit of an issue when I bought it. Good data transfer. My system goes from cold power off to Windows 10 login screen in about 20 to 25 seconds. YMMV however depending on other factors.

Couldn't find the actual read/write speeds for the 400/800/1200 GB versions (It appears different from different advertisers). Still works well and above anything else on the market, 2nd to the 1200GB version. Definitely recommend.

So there's posts out there that complain about x79 compatibility and all. PCI-E 3.0 comes from your CPU/Bios Update if you're on an x79 platform. In my case I'm running a Core i7 3970x CPU inside a P9x79 Pro Mainboard. I have 4 PCI-E 3.0 slots. Mostly being for GPU's. However one is an x8 only so when I was running Quad GPU's they were all limited to x8.Currently I'm running a single Titan X (Pascal), freeing up the other slots. I placed the Intel 720 400GB PCI-E SSD in my "second video card" slot because it was PCI-E 3.0 x16. Windows 10 found my drive when it booted up, I activated it with a GUID partition and then formatted with NTFS. I ran some speed tests and in the screen shots you will see the speed of my SATA RAID0 SSD array vs the Intel NVME Speeds.Overall, great purchase. I wish I could have afforded the 800gb or even the 1.2TB. I just wanted to test the waters. Intel states that even though the 400gb is fast, the 1.2 is highly optimized and would get even better scores.Make sure you update your BIOS to the latest version, make sure you have the latest Intel Chipset drivers as well. It makes a HUGE difference updating from version 9.something to version 10.something of Intel's drivers.