I forgot that stickers are a prime heat conducting material. Was wondering why it would even need one, like you said, aesthetic, mines has been used at 54C + for a year or something. First i've seen of SSDs having that amount of RAM though.

I was drooling over one of these 480GB (the non black edition) on my online hardware shop, but decided against getting one since it messes with my SLI pcie configuration. I don't have an M.2 slot and to my shame I'm not really sure what that does either.

I don't have an M.2 slot and to my shame I'm not really sure what that does either.

You can just get a m.2 caddy to use in SATA if you want it. Just make sure that it's whatever speed your SATA is on your motherboard. As the review mentioned though it might cap your speeds, not sure how much though, if at all.

What a great review! Much appreciated HH...your time and opinions are always highly valued (at least by me)...;) I'm still making up my mind about SSDs...I'm sold on the performance, of course, and the longevity seems to be hitting respectable norms these days... but I still have a few general questions before I buy in. How do these drives function as Windows boot drives?--I am thinking of getting a 250GB version to use as a C:\ drive @ home for nothing except Windows and utilities and device drivers, and I'm wondering if you or some of the other readers have any experience with that sort of usage and how it works out. Any advice is appreciated. I like the fact that they can put otherwise unused PCIe 2.x/x4 slots to good use, of course. But I know that as far as sheer capacity goes mechanical drives have a long, bright future ahead of them still, and economically there's no better buy per gig of storage capacity... I have heard in situations in which smallish files need to be reread and thrashed a bit that SSD's are perhaps not the best solution. Old wives' tale? Constant use as a boot drive OK? Thanks!

What a great review! Much appreciated HH...your time and opinions are always highly valued (at least by me)...;) I'm still making up my mind about SSDs...I'm sold on the performance, of course, and the longevity seems to be hitting respectable norms these days... but I still have a few general questions before I buy in. How do these drives function as Windows boot drives?--I am thinking of getting a 250GB version to use as a C:\ drive @ home for nothing except Windows and utilities and device drivers, and I'm wondering if you or some of the other readers have any experience with that sort of usage and how it works out. Any advice is appreciated. I like the fact that they can put otherwise unused PCIe 2.x/x4 slots to good use, of course. But I know that as far as sheer capacity goes mechanical drives have a long, bright future ahead of them still, and economically there's no better buy per gig of storage capacity... I have heard in situations in which smallish files need to be reread and thrashed a bit that SSD's are perhaps not the best solution. Old wives' tale? Constant use as a boot drive OK? Thanks!

I have 2 SSD drives that I installed 3 years ago and they still work great. One of them for a boot drive and the other for my favorite games. When I would lose interest and found another game that I would play everyday, I would swap out the game. I also used it for shadow play recordings because of the speed. These have lasted longer than a lot of mechanical drives I have owned. Most people use them for boot drives and use a HDD for storage and that's basically what I also do. I also got 2 more SSD's for Christmas so I'm set for awhile. I will never go back to using a HDD as a boot drive or gaming drive unless I absolutely have to, probably never. They seem to last plenty long for someone like myself who plays games and browses the net. I am not worried about lifespan one bit.

Great article But .. i would not recommend people that don't know what they are doing to fiddle with disabling prefetch and superfetch. it has nothing to do with writes, wich is only thing you should be concerned about with ssd's Fetching is only about reading, hence the name .. fetch

I have 2 SSD drives that I installed 3 years ago and they still work great. One of them for a boot drive and the other for my favorite games. When I would lose interest and found another game that I would play everyday, I would swap out the game. I also used it for shadow play recordings because of the speed. These have lasted longer than a lot of mechanical drives I have owned. Most people use them for boot drives and use a HDD for storage and that's basically what I also do. I also got 2 more SSD's for Christmas so I'm set for awhile. I will never go back to using a HDD as a boot drive or gaming drive unless I absolutely have to, probably never. They seem to last plenty long for someone like myself who plays games and browses the net. I am not worried about lifespan one bit.

Thanks for the comments! C:\ boot SSD it is...;)

Great article But .. i would not recommend people that don't know what they are doing to fiddle with disabling prefetch and superfetch. it has nothing to do with writes, wich is only thing you should be concerned about with ssd's Fetching is only about reading, hence the name .. fetch

I believe that Prefetch & Superfetch are disabled by default if you do a fresh install of an operating system on an SSD. For people that clone a drive from HDD to SSD, then these people would be the ones that need to disable Prefetch & Superfetch - this can simply be done by running Windows Experience Index after you have installed your SSD.