Pros: USB 3.1, Thunderbolt 3, M.2 and Gigabyte quality components

Cons: old UEFI firmware (BIOS), would not boot Areca 1182-ix-16 RAID HBA card from slot 3

Overall Review: I bought this knowing there was a possibility the UEFI firmware would be out of date. It was, cost me $10 shipping and a weeks delay. But I did want the features this board offered. That said, Newegg and Gigabyte really should have gone to the trouble to update the BIOS en masse. This would have been relatively easy for them to do, rather than foisting this task individually on purchasers of this product, who are not likely to have an "extra" CPU laying around. It is very likely purchasers of a high-end motherboard are going to run the latest processor. Simply pasting a disclaimer is weak. Set up a test fixture and cycle your old stock through the update. This is more of a Failure on Newegg's part than a reflection on the board. I had an issue with the RAID card not booting it's BIOS from slot 3. Moving it to slot 2, the "primary" slot in the shared bandwidth 2/3 pair of PCIe slots allowed the RAID card BIOS to boot. The video card is in slot 1. I don't know why this is, I would have thought either slot in the pair would work. So perhaps there is an issue in the UEFI firmware that needs to be addressed by Gigabyte. Just to be clear my system is up and running with the RAID card in slot 2, but it won't work in slot 3. Minus one star for this.

Pros: fast

Cons: unreliable

Overall Review: Had two of these. Restored a windows 7 disk image from backup and the SSD locked up the bios on boot. Unplugged the SSD, put the same image on a different drive, and the PC worked again. OCZ RMA'd the drive. THE EXACT SAME FAILURE HAPPENED A FEW MONTHS LATER WITH THE NEW OCZ SSD DRIVE.

Pros: reasonably fast, but not up to full interface speed

Cons: Doesn't reach the full 10Gbit of USB 3.1 type 2. Can't get hot with sustained large file transfers.

Overall Review: small and inexpensive.

Pros: Lots of storage, fast, 10e-15 bit error rate, NCQ, SMART, and all those other buzzwords that make it work better and faster with a modern RAID card. And the firmware is upgradeable if needed.

Cons: I bought 5 of these back in July. The firmware had some minor problems. I did not lose any data, but upgrading from FW version SN04 to AN05 greatly improved the performance and made some mysterious bad sectors disappear. I get 330/290 MB/sec read/write performance, easily 3 times a single drive.

Overall Review: I use these with a Highpoint 3520 SAS RAID card in RAID5 for an HTPC/media server. I love the performance and reliability. I expect they ship with SN05 FW today, so no worries for single drive users. If you use an SAS RAID card (using SFF-8087 to SATA fanout cable or similar) you should use AN05 FW. SN05 is for SATA connected drives, probably the more common use. Don't forget to remove the jumper to enable SATA II speeds.