Pros: With my old seagate hybrid 1T drive, after the bios screen, my sata controller screen and video card screen, it would take between 3.5-4 minutes to load windows 7 home premium 64bit fully including choosing a user profile. I had rebooted 15-20 times in a row to try and coax the hybrid drive to load things in the SSD portion to get it to boot faster, but I never saw much improvement. Maybe 30 seconds or so over the standard HD. With the new SSD installed, it takes between 20-30 seconds to be fully booted. And of course, opening any app is significantly faster. Outlook, Firefox, IE, chrome, all of them open near instantly now.

Cons: The only con I have is the software that came with it to clone my current drive would not work no matter what I did or how I plugged things in. It just kept giving me an error message that was nondescript. I ended up using a free version of Macrium Reflect, which worked flawlessly to clone my old system partition and C: partition to the new SSD. Once I finished cloning, I booted up on the SSD then installed the intel software to optimize the SSD settings and that software worked fine.

Overall Review: I have an older HP desktop that I have upgraded pretty much everything in to deal with ripping my entire DVD/Bluray library over the past 6 months, so I can view everything over DLNA. I'm running an [email protected] (quad core/muli-threaded to 8), 12G ram, MSI Nvidia 650Ti vid card, 600W PSU. My on-board sata controller is only Sata 2. I have a 3T internal seagate for my media drive. I had a 1T hybrid (8G onboard SSD) seagate for my primary boot drive. Supposedly this was faster than a standard HD at booting, starting apps... I honestly didn't notice a difference over the 1.5T seagate drive I was using as my primary. I have a PCI-E 4 port Sata 3 card coming in the mail. Not sure if it will work well as a boot device and pretty sure since I only have PCI-E x1 capable on my MB, I won't see the full potential of SATA3. I'll find out though in a week or so. I've only had the drive in and running for 4 or 5 days. I have ripped a few blu-rays and DVD's which I have the source of on another drive but have handbrake building the mp4 on the SSD. It ran for 9-10 hours converting everything I queued overnight running the cpu at 100% the entire time. It's not really drive intensive, but it does frequently write data and had the drive running at about 20% utilization the entire time while running the normal HD at 30%+ to read the source.

Pros: Installed fine like any typical HDD.

Cons: No issues yet.

Overall Review: Thought this was supposed to be "faster" than a standard HDD, but didn't notice any improvement really with booting or opening of outlook/firefox/handbrake... anything really. Guess I'll just save up for a SSD. If your thinking of buying, just get a 7500rpm 2T drive instead.