WD Blue Solid State Drive

I upgraded to this from a 750GB, 7,200RPM hard drive, and my boot time, which I didnt time either way, went from around 30-45 seconds, to around 5 seconds. 10 tops, from a cold boot to getting online and browsing the web. Its insane how much faster my computer is with this guy installed. I upgraded from an AMD dual core CPU with 4GB RAM to a Xeon quad core with 16GB of RAM, but while it was a faster computer, the boot and drive times really werent changed, because a hard drive can only spin so fast. Maybe there are better SSDs (I mean, Im sure anything with NVMe is going to be better) but if youre coming from a hard drive, this is a great first step.

I like everything about this SSD. It is moderately priced and is a very good value. I simply restored from my fully licensed Acronis backup on my three Windows10 Dell E6410 laptops. Everything runs quicker than with the HDDs. Why wait for a disk crash? Smarter to get ahead of probabilities and implement the SSD.

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.

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.

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 wasnt optimistic about this drive because of the price, especially compared to similar drives from Samsung, but I have been very pleased. My PC usually boots to the Desktop in about 5 seconds, files read and write very fast, and this is overall a great drive. Its not as fast as comparable Samsung EVO or PRO M.2 drives, but also about 1/5 the price.

Now, I cant actually say much as to how it fairs against other SSDs as this is the first Ive ever used. Howerver, after 5 years of putting off upgrading my main gaming system to an SSD, I am NOT disappointed. Boot times improved 70%, framefrates increased 5-10% depending on the game and are also MUCH more stable. Load times are incredible, and its really light. Do some research, buy the right SSD for you, but this one is worth the purchase if you decide. WD has been my go-to company for years on HDDs, and their SSDs do not disappoint.

Anything by WD is good. Still going strong.

Updated to 4-stars from 2 [3/26/17] So after a few emails with WD Support instead of just sending this back to Amazon, I took it upon myself to do a long format on this SSD. Long format in that I unchecked the Quick Format box.. I popped in my Kingston HyperX 120gb, reinstalled Windows for like the 3rd time that week, and did a format of this WD Blue. When everything was done, I opened up the WD Dashboard, and bam! Everything is good! Status says drive is good and the firmware updated. Speed is up to where it should be - passing my Kingston in 4 of 6 categories. SO just watch out, that you might have to format it right out of the box! Left off 1 star because of that fact.. - - - - - - - I bought this to replace the 2 SSDs I had been running - one with OS and other with Adobe Suite and a few select games [Skyrim, which is slow loading on HDD]. The idea of having just one SSD and one less drive overall was great - coupled with the great reputation of WD Blue, how could you go wrong?! Well, installing it and plopping Windows 7 on it is where things went wrong. The first attempt at installing Win7 went ok for a week or two. Then suddenly the whole system came unglued... . It dropped to a slow performance and a literal 4 minute boot time. Not having any of that, I did a fresh wipe and tried it again. This time it boots at normal speed, as Ive since isolated the problem driver, but this drive still preforms pretty slow. Looking up some benchmark/performance testing software, I ended up with a good ol fashion UserBenchmark, and even that confirmed my system was about half the beast it was pre-WD Blue. I attached a screen shot of a drive-specific test for you to see how abysmal it really was! Barely better than my aging Toshiba 2TB HDD! The 2nd Windows7 install on this Blue drive gave the proper 20-30 second boot time, but then quickly started having lags in window response times, desktop response times, and overall Explorer.exe responsiveness. Really?! Doing some more searching on SSD-optimizing software, I found that WD actually released a Dashboard for their new SSD line. That wouldve been nice to know right off the bat... So I installed it and immediately it tells me the drive is bad. Great... There was also a Firmware update. ...Great, one more piece of equipment that needs to be kept up-to-date. Then it tells me its not compatible with my system. What?? Its not a driver incompatibility, its the drive. Since when is a hard drive not compatible with a computer system?!?! WHATT?! WesternDigital, I expected so much better from you! Looks like im returning it and putting back my HyperX 120gb. Only reason I give this WD Blue 2 stars is on the chance that I just happened to get a lemon. Otherwise its been a 0-1 star experience.

I have always used samsung pro ssd, but for low end i3 desktop and laptops the western digital blue is plenty good, great value. the acronis western digital edition software you can download on the western digital website. its nice. to clone this i buy a simple usb 3 to sata cable, works wonders. sometimes it would not recognize, if that is the case remove all of your usb ports, it sucks too much power, as soon as you disconnect the other usb devices the usb/sata cable will recognize this drive.