The drive works great and is very fast, but a couple comments- It arrives unformatted so remember to first format it when installing it. Second if you want to register the drive with SanDisk write down the serial number before installing the drive. While the SanDisk web registration page says enter the "Product Code" it actually requires the serial number. I found this out after installing the drive and did want to then have to disassemble the computer. While some companies put the s/n on the box, SanDisk does not. Also no software is included and must be downloaded from the web. As is common these days, the installation instructions are skimpy and in very fine print.

*Update* It's been 9 months since I purchased my first and 6 since I purchased my third Extreme Pro. I stopped back here just to look and found out that these drives aren't reliable. Huh, I spent 30 minutes trying to find verification of this and some here and someone on Newegg says so. He even mentioned what to Google to find all the reports of this unreliable drive, but that turned out to be unreliable information, it didn't exist. You should look yourself to see if you can find all the horror stories written about owning this drive, I found problems in less than 3% of all the reviews that I could find. I can report no negatives at all.

I put together a 4790K system, very fast, and for the boot drive I researched SSD's and this came up as the fastest or nearly so, the overall fastest SATA drive I could buy.

This machine is used for a little bit of everything, but a common use is photo, audio and video editing and rendering. Presently, I actually have over 30 TB of stored files available and this is why I use a smaller, faster disk to work from, because a 1 TB SSD won't help me much and a 2 TB HDD is about $80 instead of $550. So I have the need for speed when I spend a few hours editing these files and this...is the drive used and it can't be too fast.

I currently use many SSD's, Samsung 840 Pro's, Intel 530's and Crucial M500's, all in different systems though. This would be why I didn't start with telling you how fast it boots, that change only applies when you clone from a HDD. Unless you know what programs are being loaded at startup and many other variables, I don't see the relevance anyway and have never timed booting. I like all of these drives and can't say any of them feel slow, so my first instinct told me to buy the newer M550, until I thought to myself that if I'm going with the new 4790K on a new Z97 board with 2400 MHz RAM, why not spend the extra $40 on the latest drive also. If you go read Kristian's review at Anandtech, he certainly makes a good case for it and so do the other articles about this SSD.

The specs aren't so different from the other drives but if I've learned anything from earning a living working with electronics the past 30 years, specifications need to be all inclusive and then interpreted and we rarely get enough data. My benchmarks are the highest I've ever seen, as I would expect, but I'm not the type of reviewer/amateur lab tech to display mine when the tech sites are so much better equipped for doing them (just being honest). But at the rated "up to 100K/90K IOPS and 550/520 MB/s" it almost maxes out the actual, not theoretical limit of SATA 3 which most agree is about 550 MB/s or less (some say as low as 480 MB/s) because of the bandwidth the transfer protocol uses. Another thing about this drive is it's ability to maintain it's speed. Over time a SSD's speed will degrade with use and the Extreme Pro is being touted as the best for maintaining it's speed.

This is the new generation of high end SATA drives (I'm stressing SATA because M.2 and PCIe are available with 1000 and up to 1800 MB/s limits), there is the Intel 730 and the new Samsung Pro will soon be available also and with the SanDisk we're seeing a 10 year warranty at 20 GB per day, wow. A computer product that history shows will be dated in two years is guaranteed for 10, I'll want my new replacement in 2023. Joking aside, I was purchasing the Intel and Samsung drives in part due to their 5 year warranties, because it's a good sign when a company trusts their own product against failures. The only complaint against this drive I've found is the lack of encryption, if that matters to you, but it's possible that could be addressed later through a firmware upgrade.

The SanDisk site has a Dashboard utility to download for Windows that optimizes and keeps the firmware up to date, right now I don't see anything for Mac. I put mine right into a 2.5 inch drive bay, but if you need a converter to 3.5, I've used this model. You may need a cable too, and most can use this one, unless you're using a full tower case and need the 18 inch length.

For those of you that want this drive in your laptop, don't worry, SanDisk sells an installation kit and the web will provide you with videos, sometimes for your actual machine, just do a search. But if it were me, this is what I'd do. I'd download Macrium Reflect or another free software cloning program and buy an external case to connect the SSD USB 3 to clone and then install the old drive into it afterwards. Using this will be half the cost and you'll end up with your old drive as an external. If you have a problem deleting a primary partition to use the HDD in your new enclosure, with Windows use diskpart and do a search for "using diskpart to clean a drive" and maybe even the first hit will walk you right through it.

Let's talk about power consumption. This drive compares very well with other SSD's, but...In the past few years manufacturers have been driven to produce hard drives that use less power and SSD's no longer have a decisive advantage, unless your machine is old. It's about a 1 watt average use difference and in real life you can hope for about 15 minutes longer use with SSD's and plan on 5 for most devices. The same war goes on between SSD's and the actual difference between high and low power consumption is only about .05 watt average use, so the difference in time is negligible between one SSD and another. It's not a big improvement and if your device is over a year old and you're no longer getting the usage time you once did, a new battery, not a SSD is the answer and you should also do a search for OS adjustments that reduce power consumption. SSD's no longer need this marketing ploy repeated by consumers who heard it from advertising, I would use a SSD even if I lost 15 minutes use.

This arrived as a drive in a drive sized box, in other words, nothing else except a 2.5 mm spacer and booklet. A quick explanation, 7 mm drives have been in use since 2010 but prior to that they were 9.5 mm and so the 2.5 mm spacer is required when making the change in an old laptop and in some external cases that are backwards compatible with old 9.5 mm drives. 9.5 mm hard drives are still available for replacement, just not used in design.

Bottom line? My research may say that this drive is the fastest, but unless I start pulling drives and comparing them in the same machine I'll never know, because it's in my fastest machine. No complaints from me though, it works well and I like it just fine. "It happened quicker than a 'Disk" is my new saying. As for the extra expense, this is normal for new, top of the line products and if you want to save money, Crucial makes a fine SSD and the EVO is highly rated also, you'll just be losing performance and 7 years of warranty. I paid $195 and when the price becomes lower, it will just be that much more appealing. Many of my Samsung Pro's were $100 more than this when I purchased them and on that day, they were the best.

It's my fastest SSD so far and today's best, so I can recommend it.

I see SanDisk is adding a cloning program along with the Dashboard, "coming soon". Edit: The cloning program is available now. I've also installed one of my Samsung 840 Pro's to compare (I hope you appreciate that) and the Extreme Pro is about 17/22% faster read/write and that. is. Fast. The Samsung was about the same amount faster than a M500 when I'd tested those two. You also may be interested to know that this runs very cool, in my machine anyway. Two programs report it running just 6 degrees F over ambient temperature.

For those interested, I've purchased a second (and third) one and running RAID 0 will be everything you'd think. For those wanting to try this, you need to know that it won't do as much for you unless you work with large files and for those wondering what the...I'm talking about, sorry, it's probably unimportant.

UPDATE: Well, the 850 Pro is out...do I wish I'd waited? No, I'll tell you why. I don't care about the encryption the 850 has, that's just me though, perhaps it's important to you. This is SanDisk's less expensive, and faster consumer class drive and the X300s business class, with hardware encryption, was announced two months ago and is on sale now also.

The Extreme Pro and 850 Pro trade top benchmarks from different programs and from different tech sites and I believe that's because they are both as fast as SATA gets. If faster is what you're looking for you'll need a faster port than SATA.

When you purchase the Extreme Pro your drive will be as fast as SATA allows, you will have advanced technology to maintain that speed and SanDisk's 10 year at 20 GB per day warranty...and that works for me.

This was a cinch to install, but it still took me awhile to figure out what I was doing. The other reviews were very helpful, along with the SanDisk support website. I wanted to install this SSD on my Dell Inspiron i15R-1632sLV 15.6-Inch Laptop, which has been pretty good for the most part. However, it takes forever to start up—there seems to be a lot of Dell bloatware that it could do without.

So here is the process for installing this on a laptop:

1. Obtain a USB to SATA adapter cable.

I did not realize I needed this to hook up the SSD for cloning until after step 2 so I had to wait a few days after I ordered it.

2. Clean up and back up your hard drive.

The SanDisk SSD 480 GB is smaller than the hard drive on my Dell (750 GB), and I had a lot of photos, videos, and music taking up a lot of room. So first I cleaned up my hard drive and got rid of junk I did not want anymore. Then I backed up my personal files, including all of those aforementioned photos and videos, before deleting them from my hard drive.

3. Clone your existing hard drive.

After I received the cable, I downloaded Macrium Reflect cloning software from download.com. I considered buying the software recommended by Sandisk, but other reviewers recommended Macrium Reflect. It also got good reviews from CNET. Macrium was easy to use, but it took a while to clone my hard drive onto the SSD. Plug the SSD into your USB port using the adapter. My computer at first did not install the driver for the SSD until I unplugged another USB device that was pulling power from my computer. Of course, keep your laptop power supply connected during this process—don’t try to do it on battery power. After opening the Reflect program, I decided to watch one of their Help videos on cloning a drive, which was very helpful. I followed those directions and proceeded to clone the drive. It took about two hours to complete the clone (about 125 GB of data).

4. Install the SSD.

Then all you have to do is install the SSD, which is also very easy if all the screws cooperate. Turn off and unplug your laptop. Turn it over. Remove the battery. Unscrew and remove the back panel covering the hard drive (on the Dell, I just took a guess and removed the central panel and there was the hard drive, the same size as the SSD). Remove the screws holding the hard drive bracket in the laptop, gently pull the hard drive out of the connector using the plastic pull tab on the bracket, and remove the hard drive. Then remove the screws holding the hard drive to the bracket (one of mine was difficult to remove and almost got completely stripped before coming loose. Attach the SSD to the bracket in the same way using the same screws. Set the SSD in the laptop where the hard drive was and slide the connector in place. Then screw the bracket in place using the same screws. Reattach the back panel, reinstall the battery, plug the computer back up, and start it up. The computer then required a restart to finish the installation, and that was it. The whole install process took less than 20 minutes (after the cloning part).

The difference in performance was immediately noticeable. Where before it took five minutes to start up, it now starts in less than 30 seconds. All tasks, from loading web pages to starting programs, are quite zippier than before.

I wish I had the bigger size (960 GB), but this should encourage me to keep my mess of photos and videos in better order. My only complaint is that I did not initially realize that I needed the USB to Sata adapter until I sat down to install this and then had to wait a few days while I ordered it. But that is really my own fault for not doing the research beforehand. Anyway, this is a great upgrade to my computer. Highly recommended.