Pros: IPMI 2.0, BMC, iKVM on-board and dedicated ethernet port. Has 4 x8 PCIe 2.0 expansion slots, and no legacy PCI slots. Two Intel on-board Gigabit ethernet ports. Compatible with Supermicro high-efficiency power supplies. Two on-board USB 2.0 "external" ports. Standard 12" x 13" EATX size.

Cons: None yet.

Overall Review: I got a couple of these boards to replace a couple Asus Z8PE-D12s because the Asus boards were incompatible with a high-efficiency power supply. It seems that some motherboards expect more than the 12V spec power, and the high-efficiency power supplies try to lower the voltage to very close to the spec. But this motherboard is solid and works with high-efficiency power supplies.

Pros: Marvell controller - proven, reliable Toggle flash - good performance High speeds regardless of compressibility of data

Cons: No firmware updates from Corsair Sub-par sequential read performance, esp. low QD Incompatible with most LSI and Areca RAID cards

Overall Review: I have owned this SSD for about 3 months now. When I first got it I was quite pleased with it, but as time has gone by, the Corsair has lagged behind the Plextor M3P models which it closely resembles. Plextor has released firmware updates to improve the sequential read performance and to make their SSDs compatible with hardware RAID cards. Corsair has not released any firmware updates, and they will not even answer my question whether they are currently working on a firmware update. The Plextor M3P is a better choice. Higher performance, better compatibility, timely firmware updates, and a 5 year warranty.

Pros: This is the new performance king of consumer SSDs. I measured incompressible sequential writes (and reads) of over 500 MB/s with AS-SSD. It has QD1 4K random read speeds of 35-40MB/s. And its QD32 4K random reads and writes are over 300MB/s. Has a 5 year warranty.

Cons: Uses new 21nm flash, and I cannot find a spec from Samsung on how many erase cycles it can endure. If you hit the 840 Pro really hard (eg., fill it up with small random writes and keep writing) the performance degrades significantly, the same as other consumer SSDs. But at this price, I'd rather see it hold up better under sustained heavy loads, like the Intel S3700 enterprise SSD.

Overall Review: It is too early to tell if the reliability of the 840 Pro will be as good as the 830. I guess the 840 Pro will hold up well, but anandtech had a review sample die and apparently Samsung has not been able to explain the failure. Hopefully that pre-release model was an anomaly and the production units will be fine.

Pros: No monthly fees like TiVo

Cons: Unreliable -- intermittently misses recordings, partial recordings No support forum Support people are condescending and unresponsive to firmware issues

Overall Review: It can work without issues sometimes for weeks, and then for no apparent reason, it will have numerous missed recordings and partial recordings for days or weeks. Checking Ceton's "crashlog.txt" shows that the actual firmware is crashing and rebooting the card, resulting in missed recordings. If you check the various forums, you will see that many people are experiencing similar problems. It is intermittent because you only notice it if the card reboots while you are recording a program (or about to record). Some have speculated it is a memory leak in the firmware that causes the card to randomly reboot. Ceton has know about the issue for at least 3 months, and they seem unwilling or unable to fix it. Ceton is a small company and I suspect that they have abandoned supporting current products in order to work on building their new products (Q and Echo).

Pros: Good board layout, extended ATX fits in most EATX cases. Includes IPMI remote management ASMB4-IKVM.

Cons: Motherboard is incompatible with Supermicro 1200W power supply that comes with the Supermicro SC836-R1200B chassis. I connected both 8-pins and one 24-pin power connector, the standby power LED on motherboard will come on but when power is switched on the fans spin for half a second and then the motherboard goes into "protection mode", meaning nothing happens. I had two of these motherboards and two of the power supplies, and both had the same problem. I did have a very old Seasonic power supply, only 400W, that I connected to one motherboard, and that allowed the motherboard to POST. I measured the voltage on the Supermicro rails, and all were in spec.

Overall Review: If you check the Asus website, there are a number of posts with similar problems, mostly with high-efficiency 1000+ W power supplies such as Corsair and Thermaltake. The high efficiency power supplies keep the voltages on the rails as close to the spec as possible, whereas lower efficiency power supplies will often be 0.1 or 0.2 V above spec. I think this motherboard expects to receive voltages higher than the spec, and so fails with many high-efficiency power supplies. I swapped these boards with Supermicro X8DTE-F motherboards (same power supplies) and everything is working perfectly. Asus technical support was not helpful. They kept repeating that it was either defective motherboards or defective power supplies. Well, I measured the power supplies with a multimeter, and they are fine. The boards just require higher voltage than spec -- a serious design flaw that Asus should address.

Pros: I bought 16 of these to use in a RAID 6 on an Areca 1680ix controller. The drives seem to get along fine with the controller, including being able to read the SMART attributes. After some initial problems with 2 of the drives, I now have a smoothly functioning 16 drive RAID 6 array with 26TB of capacity (it is RAID 6 with hot spare).

Cons: One of 16 failed immediately -- could not even read the SMART attributes, although it did spin up. Another failed after initialization (during verify) with a lot of read errors and the SMART reallocation count dropping rapidly to near threshold.

Overall Review: The drives were shipped to me in a 20-pack foam tray (presumably the one WD used to ship the drives to newegg) but that tray was poorly wrapped in bubble wrap, leaving the edges and corners of some of the HDDs unprotected. Since the foam tray was placed in another box (with other items I ordered) and the edges of the drives were almost directly against the inside of the box, I suspect that the two drives were damaged during shipping to me. As others have stated here many times, it is amazing that newegg's packers do not know to completely cover every HDD with bubble wrap, including the corners and edges. All it takes is one sharp impact to a HDD corner during shipping to destroy the HDD.