SanDisk Extreme PRO 240GB SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5-Inch 7mm Height Solid State Drive (SSD)

I had been contemplating replacing my 6 year old HP desktop. I use this machine primarily for photo editing. I bought it with a AMD Quad Core processor and over the years I had upgraded the RAM from 8GB to 12GB. But with all of the large, resource intensive programs I had on the machine, my start up time had deteriorated to about 4 mins with an additional 15-20 mins where it was unusable due to McAfee running its initial scans. Then I heard on a photography podcast about upgrading my boot drive to an SSD. After doing plenty of research I decided that rather than drop $1200-1500 on a new tower, Id give the SSD a shot for less than a third of that price. Worse comes to worse, I could always use the SSD in another device if I still needed to replace my machine. So I ordered the SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB drive since I needed the space. I used Macrium Reflect to clone my boot drive over to the SSD. This did take about 12 hours since I was using an adapter cable and USB 2.0 connection. But once it was done, the installation was fairly simple. Bottom line, wow!!! What a difference. My boot time went from 4 mins to 40 secs and the unit was usable within a couple of mins after that. Now my Lightroom and Photoshop applications start up in less than a minute where it was taking several minutes each previously. Im thrilled with the results and would recommend this change highly to anyone having similar issues with their computer. I cant say how much better or worse this drive is compared to any other ones, but I can say it has done wonders for my desktop machine and I feel like I can squeeze another few years out of my HP.

Holy crap. I bought this out of desperation and hatred for my Late 2011 Macbook Pro. The thing has been a piece of junk since I bought it and even 3 apple stores have said that something is wrong because its so slow...but it passed all their tests...so nothing they could do. That MacBook took over 15 seconds to open any app...since the day I bought it. It could barely turn itself on. Bottom line: I read J. Perkins (posted 8/30/14) and Andrea Polks review (posted 8/17/14) and made this thing happen in so little time. I bought the harddrive, the Inateck 2.5 USB 3.0 external case (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FCLG65U/ref=ox_ya_os_product_refresh_T1) and cloned the whole Macbook harddrive. That took hours, I think 13 or so...but I had over 450GB on the HDD. I had to go to Home Depot and buy a small Torx bit screwdriver, because I didnt have a T6 (tiny). I looked up how to select the external (SSD) as my startup disk for the Macbook (have the computer ignore the installed drive on start up and load the OS from the external/SSD). The computer worked, was already faster so I decided to go for it. I took the back of the laptop off, carefully removed the hard drive and placed this SSD in there. I had to use a small furniture cushion as a spacer between the case and the drive to keep it secure but THEN... I started the computer, its super fast, opens every app within seconds (Ive actually started the computer and clicked every app at the bottom to watch it load up super fast). Totally worth it, honestly like a new computer. Ive since formatted the old Macbook hard drive, removed the mounting screws and its not installed in the inateck case as a 500GB external harddrive to store GoPro and pictures on. Wife = happy.

Ive always stuck with SanDisk drives, whether SD cards or SSDs. After buying smaller SSDs to do a duel drive setup, one for the OS and a HDD for the files, only to find that I needed more space for more programs I finally bit the bullet and got one large SSD for everything. Totally worth it. My computer flies. Im not much of a gamer and mainly use my computer for leisure and photography. My computer boots up really quick, mere seconds, and Lightroom and Photoshop run smoothly and quick.

I bought four of these for a new system. It has been six months now and I am pleased with the speed. However one of the units was defective and when I got around to the installation it was past the Amazon return period. So I returned it to SanDisk the supposed 10 year warranty. After several tedious e-mail exchanges they said I could return it, which I did 6 months ago. After one month they acknowledged receipt of the item. But I have not heard a word since then. Hence the two star review. The ten year warranty is nice but if they dont honor it the promise isnt worth much. It is a good product but dont buy it because of the warranty. Update 9/5/2015 I have had the 4 units now for about a year. Use is moderate. I am a software developer and I use one drive for compiling. The other three receive less use. SMART reports bad sectors on 3 of the 4 drives, ranging from 10 to 40. I am told that this is not sufficient to return the drives under warranty, but most of the drive health utilities that I have recommend that I watch the drives carefully, especially the one with 40 bad sectors. I am lowering the review from 2 to 1 star. I cannot recommend these drives. I got a couple of nasty comments because of a typo in the original post. I said I returned the drive to Samsung. That was a typo. Of course I sent it to the manufacturer (Sandisk). That should have been obvious. You cant just send drives back. You have to call and give them the serial numbers and get permission to return. I had Samsung on my mind because I just purchased Samsung replacements, which so far are working great. It was an honest typo. No need for the nasty comments.

Seems to work great, plugged it into my Mac Pro with this adapter:

Bought this to replace a cramp and aging (much more expensive at the time) OCZ Vertex 3 128GB on my personal rig. Although it isnt a move from conventional hard disk to SSD but I can clearly see the difference for my day to day computing and the occasional gaming. Boot up is clearly faster and smoother. I dont ever bother with benchmarks anymore as most good stuff are pretty well reviewed and I caught this at a bargain price. Very happy with my purchase.

UPDATE: After about a year, my new drive failed. My Mac would periodically grey screen after freezing ever since I installed this drive. In January it would grey screen a couple times a day. Actually what happened was that one window would freeze then eventually another and another and finally the entire screen would go grey, but the machine would track the mouse for a while longer. One day I noticed that I could not do an image backup and checking the logs it always failed on the same file: ta da! A read error on the disk was the only cause. I tried to access the file directly and it caused the freeze. The Extreme PRO had been causing the problem all along but had finally left a clue that showed it was the culprit. This was disappointing but the real fun occurred when I tried to fix it. First I downloaded a SMART utility to run on my mac and evaluate what was wrong. This was VERY difficult since it involved installing all kinds of packages on the Mac and actually compiling source code to install the linux utilities that scanned the SMART status. The SMART utilities showed that the drive had had about 20 bad blocks and thousands of power cycles - which I presumed was due to the Macs sleep function. I know that power cycles are bad for SSDs but I think I have the right to assume that a major manufacturer would have considered this. My first thought, as the SanDisk rep made in a comment to another bad review, was to upgrade the firmware. Unfortunately Im on a Mac and apparently SanDisk thinks Mac users dont matter, because their fancy SSD utility that updates the firmware only runs on windows. First I tried running it in a VirtualBox Windows machine, but it couldnt find the SSD. So I tried their process to build a flash drive image of their utility and after hours of trying I had to give up because the Mac would not boot from the flash drive, in all likelihood because the utility was designed for an older version of MacOS. I finally succeeded in burning an ISO to a CD with the Macs superdrive. Thank god my imac was old enough to have one! After nearly 12 hours of reading online knowledgebase notes, SanDisk support community postings and trying everything I could with my nearly 40 years of computer experience, I finally was was able to run the utility on the CD and update the Extreme Pro. By this time I was fuming at the waste of time, the poor attention to support materials, and the unmaintained utilities. Not to mention that one of the support articles said that OS X El Capitan was probably not compatible with the drive (ridiculous!) Once the firmware was updated, the drive started to work and has worked for the last few weeks without issue. However I no longer trust it. I would like SanDisk to replace it. However their return policy is ridiculous: you have to remove the drive from teh computer and take pictures of it and plead for a replacement, then wait while your drive is sent in and evaluated before they send you a new one. Once its out of the computer I cant run any tests on it, so theyll have to take my word for it but I bet they wont. And have you tried removing a hard drive from an iMac? Its a multi-hour procedure. Am I going to open the iMac twice to replace their drive when they send the replacement? Or, live without a computer for months while they decide what to do with my drive? Their support policies are ridiculous: Im going to have to buy another drive just to keep using my iMac while they fix my old one. OLD REVIEW: I replaced the hard drive in my 2011 iMac with this and it ZOOMS! I needed a kit from Otherworld Computing to do it (especially to get the screen off and adapt this drive to the Apple-specific connector.) Boot speed is up, used to take 2-3 minutes, now takes 20 seconds. The computer runs cooler too.

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. Four years later and it still works flawlessly.

Absolutely amazing, took my mid 2011 iMac running Mavericks from a boot time of over a minute to under 10 seconds with absolutely no lag. I cannot recommend it enough - the pro class is definitely the way to go with an SSD and the 10 year warranty is just the icing on the cake. It makes my old iMac feel like a totally different and new machine. With it more than 1/2 full (190 GB FREE), it still is clocking in at 380-410 MB/s read and write - definitely work the money.