WD Blue Solid State Drive

I purchased this to replace my hard drive in a Late 2012 MacMini. This is a wonderful upgrade. It has really sped up my computer and lowered the temperature. Installation was pretty straight forward. I also purchased a tool kit that had the right tools to disassemble the MacMini. Took about 15 min. Restoring the drive took about 6 hours from my Time Machine I always stick with WD drives just because I have always had good luck with them and never had one fail yet.

I first bought the WD 250 Blue M.2 SSD which arrived DOA as nothing would recognize it, even after talking to the WD support. Amazon gave me a very quick refund on the 250Gb, so I thought that I would give this 500 Gb drive a try. This replacement arrived very quickly and installed easily except for the small screw that holds the board in place. It installs on the motherboard between the large CPU cooler and the large video card. There was no way for me to get my hands in there to work, so I removed the video card and it was still a tight fit to access the mounting screw. After physically installing the WD Blue 500 Gb M.2 SSD, I downloaded the free (With a WD Drive) Acronis disk management software for cloning the existing Samsung SSD to the new drive; which ran without a hitch. This freed up a lot of space on drive C: and made both the boot time and program opening time almost instantaneous. If you have an available M.2 slot on your motherboard and wanting to speed up the boot and programs, I highly recommend installing one of these.

Other reviewers have probably written much better reviews than I ever could so Im just going to keep this short and sweet. Should you buy this? Yes. Yes you should. If youre still booting your computer on an old hard disk drive, do yourself a favor and stop. It really will shorten the boot time for your computer by an exponential amount. If you store your files on this hard drive, it will also make it faster to pull up those. You probably already know this, which is why you are looking at SSDs in the first place Im sure. So I say again, if you are unsure of whether or not you should buy this and you are still using a HDD to boot your computer, buy this. Its worth it. Trust me (and all the other reviewers)

My first SSD, but loading it up was a snap. I had a 250 gb primary drive, and because this was the same size, cloning this drive with my Sabrent took no effort at all. Plugged it into my computer in place of the old drive, and it restarted once (to get new drivers, no doubt) and has performed since without a glitch. Fast. Just what I was hoping for. Price was excellent through Amazon. Would definitely recommend it. I have no ability to compare it to other SSD drives, smaller or larger, since this is my first, but compared to my old HDD, it is almost unbelieveable. Love it!

I have a nice all-in-one 24-inch family PC. However, it has been struggling because of a poor spinning disk hard drive. I cloned the hard drive to the SSD and replaced it without a hitch. The PC is probably 10 to 20 times faster, especially from boot to doing something productive. Used to be on a restart it would take roughly 5 minutes before I could do something as simple as open a browser window. Now it is a 10-second restart, and I am immediately able to launch Chrome, and it opens fast! I do not have any comments on long term durability, but out-of-the-box it is fantastic!

For a TLC drive this performs exceptionally well - both in its sequential reads and writes as well as its random performance. As others have stated this is a result of a merger between WD and Sandisk. The drive unfortunately comes with a shorter warranty than the Sandisk badged drives. This drive is not for power users, although the performance on this drive is better than I expected. I attached a screen shot from a CrystalDiskMark test I ran on the drive that shows how the drive performs conducting both sequential and random reads and writes to the disk. Although the test reveals the sequential writes as going over 530 megabytes per second, the reality will be a little different. Once the drives buffer fills up the write speed will drop into the mid 200s - still very fast for a TLC budget drive. Random reads are about 46 megabytes per second while random writes come in at 160. I would expect that number to drop under a sustained heavy load as well. All in this is a decent performing drive. But you may want to look at the Sandisk X400 which is the same drive and a little faster on sequential writes and gives you a 5 year (vs. 3 year on the WD) warranty.

Seems to be working well now that I have it installed, but I had a heck of a time getting the old HDD image brought over. I must have reformatted and cloned at least 5 or 6 times, but would get MBR errors on each reboot. Finally I ended up burning a Windows 10 image to a CD and then using the repair utility to fix the MBR issue. That solved problem #1. The next issue was that no matter what I did to try and manage the partitions on the new drive, the Acronis software (downloadable from WD) would only copy over my old partition (250 GB) and then allocate the remaining space to an inaccessible recovery partition with no drive letter. I tried this about 5 or 6 times as well, including using the advanced features to size the partitions myself. Ultimately I had to download a 3rd party utility to access the unpartitioned space and get it assigned to a drive letter. If youre not comfortable with some of the finer nuances of disk drives, partitions, disk repair, and other utilities then you may want to get a friend to help install. So, despite all that, the HDD is now up and running and seems to be working just fine. I will say its a good value to get a 1TB drive for this price.

In recent years I have tried several different brands of SSDs, and I think this is the best one yet. On my newest Windows 7 computer (refurbished HP Compaq Elite 8300 SFF PC) I try as much as possible to keep my data (that changes quite often) on the D: drive, so my C: drive (the WD SSD) remains as lean as ever may be. I also carefully monitor which programs and services start up automatically with Windows. As currently configured, the C: drive has a total of 57GB occupied of the reported 232GB available. When I restart my computer, it is back up and ready to go in about 50 seconds from the time I initiate the restart. That kind of performance, and my years of happy experience with WD products, give me confidence that this WD SSD will prove to be a very worthwhile investment.

The drive installed easily. However, Western Digitals cloning software corrupted my Windows software and I had to reinstall Windows. Of course, because I never thought I needed it, I didnt make a reinstall disc when I purchased my Dell desktop. After using Western Digitals software, I spent about 5 hours trying to diagnose the corrupted drive through Dells utilities, only to give up an have to to a factory data restore of my whole computer. I would have lost all my data, had I not backed it up before installing Western Digitals SSD. Do not buy this product. Spend money on another SSD from another manufacturer

Cloned a 250GB 7200RPM HDD to this 500GB SSD running Win7 and Office 2010, as a test to see if ther was a decent speed improvement. 3.5 min boot time is now 40 sec, 50 sec Outlook load time is now 8 sec. Best computer investment Ive ever made, no doubt. Just bought 2 more to install in my parents computers so they stop frickin opening 11 frickin instances of Outlook every frickin time they start them because they keep clicking the frickin icon thinking the frickin computer is frickin ignoring them or some frickin thing and then complaining to me about how frickin slow the frickin computers are which makes me want to bang my frickin head on the frickin desk.