Pros: This drive is very fast and a good price

Cons: My first drive failed after eight months with some bad blocks, but was still bootable and data was retrievable. The RMA process to get that taken care of was a nightmare. The standard option will take week. The Advanced Repair option requires a hold on a credit card, which is standard practice, but they charged me nearly $400 for this ~$200 drive and expected me to pay for shipping. When confronted about the cost disparity, their official response was that they "did not want to undercut their resellers." They don't want to undercut their resellers on REPLACING A DEFECTIVE DRIVE. It's a temporary hold, but it's insane to put a hold twice the cost of the drive on ANY retail outlet on a card.

That new drive from the RMA just catastrophically failed 6 months later and destroyed my partitions irrevocably and cannot be repaired or rebuilt.

I'm not looking forward to going through another RMA process with them and will be looking to another brand. Don't buy this drive unless you're an expert in data recovery or don't care about your data.

Pros: Board looks nice and is a good price for the specs, theoretically

Cons: DOA. No post, no display, nothing. Some Google searching turned up that this seems to be a frighteningly common issue with this board. After checking and ensuring no bent pins, swapping every other component imaginable other than the CPU, and a lot of frustration, the board is most assuredly dead.

To fix it, MSI wants me to pay to ship it to them and then send me a refurbished one. That is absolutely not going to happen and I will not be purchasing another MSI product in the future.