Best Hardware of 2015 – The KitGuru Editorial Awards

Our Technical Excellence category is always one of the hardest to decide. We no longer live in a world of constant failure, where you spend as much time maintaining your rig as you do using it. If you install the latest version of Windows 10 onto a PC with quality hardware, then your chances of a BSOD are close to zero. We put computers to sleep and poke them away in a mater of seconds – and even a ‘cold boot' with an SSD-based laptop is measured in seconds, not minutes.

Samsung's drive to push V-NAND has already had a big impact on the market – with 48-layer 3rd generation product already being lined up for sale in 2016. From the first NVMe product announcement in July 2013, to KitGuru's choice of Solid State Drive of the Year 2015, the SSD market has changed completely.

What we previously considered ‘fast' has been blown away with PCI Express and M.2 products. Storage capacity has shot up and the days of wondering if you could live with a 64GB drive to having ‘400GB of some of the fastest storage ever seen' available at just over £200.

Which brings us to the winner of this year's award, the Intel SSD 750.

Sure, performance is stunning, but that is only part of the story. Intel has put a lot of work into compatibility, to improve the boot process across a wider range of set-ups – as well as reducing latency times and maximising the lifespan of the drive. As a result, the declared MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is now 1.2 million hours of use – enough for even the most hardcore data centre or Warcraft warrior.

With a fast drive from the previous generation of SSD technology, a sustained read speed of more than 500MB/sec was considered strong performance. The Intel SSD 750 drives deliver over 3 times that speed. And it does that at just £225 for the 400GB version.

In every way, this drive represents a glimpse into the future. In the same way that Intel pioneered the dawn of the original Solid State Drive era with the X25, it is now leading the charge into a new tomorrow.

KitGuru's choice for Technical Excellence 2015 goes to the Intel SSD 750.

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