I got this for $179 when is was on sale, but with it being such a great buy I wouldn't hesitate to purchase @ $300 if it's what you need. Synthetic benchmarks on my computer show that I am getting above the rated Read and Write values, but there is a trick to it. Under normal operation you'll never see values like that. The benchmark software uses multithreaded operations that can saturate the throughput on the drive very easily. This however doesn't mean that you won't see awesome real life performance. I have mine sandwiched between two EVGA GTX 670 FTW graphics cards on an Asus Rampage IV Extreme motherboard and it does get a little warm, but I have had no issues at all since the initial install and cloning my original SSD. A lot of people say you can't clone a normal SSD to this one, but if your BIOS sees the RevoDrive and can accept it as a boot drive it will work just fine. You'll just need to make sure that the software you are using will work properly. For me the cloning process was effortless, but i did use paid software to do so (paragon hard disk manager 12 professional).
You'll want to make sure that your motherboard can boot to PCI-e devices and will support any of the Revo Drives as boot a device. I think it's safe to say that any motherboards that were built in the last year are going to work just fine, but verify if you can. Boot times are longer because it takes 5-8 seconds for the firmware to initialize before the operating system will begin to boot. I don't feel this is a negative at all, but there are some people that won't like this. This drive does support TRIM and its SCSI equivalent, dubbed UNMAP. Windows 7, however, does not support TRIM or UNMAP with this drive because Windows 7 only supports TRIM and/or UNMAP with AHCI devices. The RevoDrive 3 is seen as a Storport device, like other high-performance buses, such as fibre channel buses, and RAID adapters. Windows 8 does support TRIM and Smart for Storport devices so this might push you to make the move to Windows 8 sooner than later.
Overall I think this has truly been the best SSD I've owned. I don't get BSOD and speeds are consistent across the board for the past few months. One way I've tried to maintain the lifespan of my SSDs is by configuring a RAM Disk to store all computer Temp data/files that are accessed regularly as well as any internet files, browser profiles and extensions or applications that are very write intensive and have a small footprint. This can be easily accomplished with NTFS Junction Points, or just simple changes to where things are stored by default, or by installing them on the RAM disk in the first place.
| Hard Drive | 120 GB Solid State Drive |
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