With SSD speed growing and there no news on SATA4.0 (SATA3.2 is really desperate) PCIe SSDs will probably have growing demand. If by end of 2015, there still won't be news on upcoming SATA3.x successor, Skylake paired with PCIe SSD could be the new meta. I really would love to have reasonable priced 128Gb PCIe SSD for system and main programs. Here how I would image new meta: 1) PCIe SSD (128 / 256GB) : System, freq used programs 2) SATA SSD (512 / 1TB) : Games, Programs 3) HDD : Movies, Picurues, Audio, Libraries, etc... Skylake should be reasonable update for people with older CPUs (pre Haswell), and get best UEFI support for PCIe SSDs. Looking forward for PCIe SSD market grow.

Great review...! Exceptionally thorough, as usual. The drive speed tests out as incredible when the drive itself is the main thing being tested. It would be interesting to know how much of the PCIe3.x bandwidth this drive is using...! Would suggest that maybe some thought be put towards a multitasking benchmark--say running a Crossfire/SLI performance bench at the same time as some of the drive benchmarks---just to stress the bus a bit to see if things change when the available bandwidth drops off, if it drops off (which we already know is the case w/ PCIe2.x). Another possibility is to run the drive benches at the same time you run a PCIe3.x IGP benchmark suite...because then you have two devices tugging at the PCIe bus and competing for bandwidth (the IGP being far more PCIe-dependent in terms of performance than discrete GPUs--which really don't need much in the way of performance from PCIe3.x) Might be fun--...;)

Damn. Skylake can't release sooner ... what a big tech upgrade it will be for me! I'd love to have this.

I don't get it, it has been few years now since SSD's have reached SATA's maximum speed, why there still isn't SATA 4 available? When they finally release it it will already be outdated... by newer ssd's

I find that this is incredible. But, Hilbert, does it feel any different from any other SSD? I mean, is it like going from dial up to high speed?

It's tech like this that is seriously getting my upgrade itch going...

I got some Cortizone-10 cream if you need it.... Nothing really seems to give me that urge anymore. This summer I'm planning to pickup an SSD for my laptop and possibly pickup a new laptop for my wife. Aside from that, I'm actually considering selling the system in my specs and replacing it with one of the Intel compute sticks.

Great review. I was particularly interested in the clarification of UEFI/PCI-E 2.0 limitations, because I was waiting for a good PCI-E SSD for my SATA2.0 limited X58 board and in reality I couldn't believe it wouldn't properly work in an X58. It surely is good to know, although it is a let down, as I feel that a design with an onboard BIOS and a x16 PCI-E would make it work just as well as it does in modern boards.

Was that SSD a review unit or production? So, considering all the thermal pads and massive heatsink, does it ship with a pack of bacon to fry on it? Just how hot does that thing get?

Forgive a noob question, but I'm a bit hazy on the subject of PCI lanes and how they're switched between devices that use them. Specifically, I'm looking to build around an i7-5820K, an X99 motherboard, and the 400 GB version of this Intel SSD. My current gfx is a GTX 780, which I'll transfer to the new build. I may upgrade this in time, but it's unlikely I'll ever go to multiple gfx cards. I read that the i7-5820K supports only 28 PCI lanes, so will this CPU be enough for a high-end gfx plus the SSD, or do I need to move to the i7-5830K which has 40 PCI lanes? I certainly don't want to lash out on the hyper-fast SSD and then find that its performance is crippled in some way because of another component.