SanDisk SSD Plus 120GB 2.5-Inch SDSSDA-120G-G25 (Old Version)

Solid SSD upgrade at a competitive price, however this is more of a middle of the road performer in that its definitely an improvement over any harddrive in the way of speed but the difference between this and a Samsung Evo is like night and day. Whats odd is that the write speed, while still greater than a harddrive, is still slower than expected. Still, a very good starting point for those on a budget, but I urge that users make the effort to get an Evo instead

Please see UPDATE 2 for more details on the sequential read speeds. UPDATE 1 is based on an erroneous benchmark. This is my first experience with an SSD and I must say that Im quite pleased so far. I wanted a second storage device for my ThinkPad T420 on which to run Linux and wanted to try an SSD, but didnt want it to be too expensive. After reading some reviews I decided to go with this one; it seemed good for its price. I also did some research beforehand on how Linux and SSDs interact. The distribution I selected was SparkyLinux 4.0, which is a Debian testing derivative. I mounted the SSD via the T420s UltraBay, using a third-party caddy. This was extremely easy and was done in about a minute. During installation, I put the /var and /tmp partitions on the laptops internal HDD, since these directories tend to get written to frequently. After the initial install, I set the swappiness to 1 and enabled trim manually by editing /etc/fstab, adding the discard and noatime options. These steps were all taken in an effort to reduce wear on the SSD. To further reduce wear, I also installed profile-sync-daemon. I should mention that SparkyLinux does not appear to have hibernate functionality installed by default; I had to actually install the hibernate command before it would hibernate properly. Once everything was set up, it was off to the races. The computer boots up in less than 10 seconds and application launch times are considerably faster than with any HDD Ive seen. I havent conducted any benchmarks, but given the low price and the stance of other reviews, I cant imagine that its winning any records. Still, it seems to be a great budget option and Im very pleased with it thus far. It gets 5 stars because its super cheap and is tangibly much faster than an HDD; any complaints have to be measured against its price. I am now considering getting another one for a different laptop and will update this review if I have any issues down the road. UPDATE 1 (10-09-2015): I finally did some benchmarking and as it turns out, the drive only exhibits a sequential read of ~290 MB/sec, which isnt even close to the advertised 520. This is a bit disappointing, but I dont care too much as its still plenty fast enough to meet my requirements. Although my requirements are not high, the lower-than-advertised sequential read is probably information that people will want to know, so Im mentioning it. Right now, Im not sure if the drives a lemon or if something else is slowing it down. Ive heard some claims that that the T420s UltraBay doesnt reach SATA III speeds, and its also possible that the caddy Im using is the bottleneck. A final possibility is that its a driver issue in SparkyLinux. Since I need to do more research on this matter and Im still satisfied with the drive, Im not changing my rating yet. Cached reads, incidentally, are ~4500 MB/sec. UPDATE 2 (10-09-2015): I decided to use a different software benchmark to test the drives read performance and it reports that in fact, the sequential read performance is ~510 MB/sec. Its good to know that it was a software issue that produced the previous result. Of course, no drive ever actually hits its advertised performance, but this drive comes very close and I dont think anyone will feel cheated. UPDATE 3 (10-10-2015): Ordered a second one for the aforementioned different laptop, a ThinkPad X131e, and dropped SparkyLinux on it as well. I used the same adjustments as before to reduce wear. Once again, the sequential read is ~510 MB/sec, so thats 2 for 2 good drives now. Whatever SanDisk is doing here, it seems to be working. The performance gains are significant for this slow computer. Boot time has been cut in half, programs start up quickly if not instantly, and hibernating went from agonizingly slow to completely tolerable. Its still slower than the T420 - obviously, the SSD cant fix its underpowered CPU - but its not a laggy mess anymore and honestly, thats all I needed.

Right now, the drive is good. It is running. I hope it is reliable. Good price for a larger size. My last Solid State Drive was Crucial M500. However, the past two weeks it would stop loading up windows forcing me to restart that allowed it to run normal. It did this every time I turned on the computer. Even after I did a windows 10 reset. A reset returns windows to the way it was when you first installed the Operating System. Maybe the drive needed a format. I doubt it. I might choose to cash in on the warranty. I dont think I will be buying Crucial anymore for Solid State Drives.

Im going to keep this review short and sweet. I bought this drive to upgrade a pretty old laptop. Im talking a laptop whos warranty expired over 5 years ago. To make a long story short, the laptop is now flying along as if it were new again. This is one of the single best upgrades Ive ever done on a laptop! Just a note, I also took the 1 TB drive out of the laptop, put it into a cdrom/hard drive caddy, and put it back into the laptop via the cdrom drive port. I use this second drive to store all of my music, movies, photos, etc. If youre on the fence about buying an SSD drive as an upgrade for an older laptop, just do it. You wont regret it.

I bought 2 of these and used them to clone my wifes and my laptop hard drives so we could use the cloned drives to install the free Windows 10 upgrade and still have Windows 7 hard drives to go back to if we didnt like Windows 10. They worked great for that and these 240 GB drives have enough space for Win 10 and all the programs we need to run. My wife doesnt have a lot of other things stored on her computer so it was big enough for all her needs. I have terabytes of pictures, home movies and videos stored on a second 2 TB internal HD in my laptop and several USB HDs so the 240 GBs was plenty for my system drive. I would recommend these to anyone who needs a fast system drive without a large amount of on board storage.

I purchased this to upgrade a circa 2011 Toshiba Satellite which was expensive at the time but had become uncomfortably slow with to the original HDD. The laptop would take a few minutes to boot and the drive was pegged during any application launch. Resource monitor showed disk latency hovering in the 1000s and queue lengths over 50. In short, after logon and you had to start up your apps and walk away until it calmed down. CPU and memory usage were fine so this was clearly an IOPS problem. For under $70 I used this 240 GB SSD to turn the laptop into what feels like a new device. I had a copy of Acronis on a desktop so I used that to clone the partitions from the laptop HDD to the new SSD. Everything worked as expected and its like a new laptop now.

First time using Sandisk SSD, Unfortunately Sandisk SSD dashboard is not compatible to Win XP OS. So I removed my Samsung 840 Evo SSD from my Lenovo S10-3 Win 7 and tried installing the Sandisk SSD Dashboard there but the display resolution is not compatible as it requires minimum 1024X768 while the Lenovo S10-3 is 1024X600. Very surprised though as the Samsung Magician software still runs on the Lenovo S10-3. Anyway, currently I used EaseUS Todo Back-up free to clone my Win XP machine to the Sandisk SSD and tune the machine to be SSD optimize. I downloaded Sandisk SSD toolkit on my XP machine but it did not recognize the Sandisk SSD PLUS installed. Oh well, I probably switch over one of my Samsung 850 EVO SSD from my MSI Win 7 machine to the XP machine and use the Sandisk SSD PLUS on it. At least if Sandisk has home built cloning software such as Samsung Migrate and Samsung Magician on CD (rather that downloading it), this will ease the user installation experience

UPDATE: I got SSD crazy and ordered another one. Im putting them in a raid 0 configuration and getting around 930 MBs read speeds. Raid 0 is very insecure, if one drive fails, all the data is lost, but Im not too worried about it. I used to have 2 1 wd tb hdds in raid 0, and was only getting 100 mb/s 60-70 write. Everything installs instantly, and my favorite part, when windows makes you wait to update during boot, it happens 10x quicker. I put all my video games (GTA, crysis, battlefield, cod, dirt, ect) on the ssds and for all games they load levels faster, some load almost instantly. My computer used to take about 4-5 min to start up and be able to use an app properly. Now it takes 20 seconds.... Proof is in the pudding. 520MB/s on crystal disk mark. Now i have a nice boot/program drive and 2TB for all my movies.

I bought two of these to use in a couple of older laptops and see what performance I could eke out of them. Neither laptop was cutting edge, so even though this doesnt top the list in terms of performance, its a trusted brand and the price was right (it was cheaper than most other 240GB SSDs at the time of purchase). One went into an old Turion x2 laptop running Windows Vista. Because I didnt have the recovery disc for Vista and I didnt really want to spend too much time with it, I just imaged the drive over using Macrium Reflect to the SSD. It made a huge difference in usability. The boot time is still depressingly slow (but far faster than it used to be -- was over 3 minutes before, now its closer to 60-90 seconds from power button to usable Windows screen), but the responsiveness of the laptop has improved greatly. Also, being a 9 year old laptop with data that we didnt want to lose on it, I figured it was time for a backup anyway, so this way we have the old HDD sitting around as the data backup. The other went into a 1st gen i7 laptop running Windows 7. Unlike the other laptops Id installed 7mm thick SSDs into up until this, this one really required a 9.5mm drive. Thankfully, this SSD (like many others) came with a plastic spacer. With the spacer in place on the SSD, I was able to align the drive and slide it in to the appropriate SATA connectors. I installed Windows 7 fresh on this SSD, and then installed the Windows 10 upgrade on it, figuring that this laptop can now last a number of years. I still have the option of going back to 7 if I hate it, but Microsoft will let me use 10 again at a later date, because its been upgraded before the year period was up. Man, does this laptop boot silly fast now. Its up in just a handful of seconds from power on, and its ready to go. Apps just fly open now. I love it. As Im sure you know just by looking into purchasing an SSD, no matter what laptop you have, if its got an HDD, going to an SSD will provide some benefit. Theres very little downside to SSDs from a performance standpoint. Its mainly price per GB and the data densities available that keep SSDs from being the only thing you see out there. Its definitely headed in that direction, for better or for worse. For my part, Ive been thrilled with my SSDs in my laptops, and these also dont disappoint. Very nice performance, from a solid brand, at a great price. Im happy with that.

This drive is ultra skinny, but included a spacer that has adhesive strips to put on the drive. I did for my Dell laptop and it fit well, without it the tie down brackets wouldnt sit right. I cloned the existing drive with Macrium Reflect free, http://www.macrium.com/pages/windows10.aspx , and an external drive cable https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B011M8YACM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1, once that was done in about 20 minutes I just swapped the drives , rebooted and like lightning the SSD took off made the laptop faster then its ever been for a very good price. Hope it lasts.