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.

Installed super easy. I read all kinds of complex stories about settings people had to change on their mainboards to get M2 disks to work properly and be bootable. I had an issue right out of the gate, and then noticed my firmware was a year old. Updated my BIOS and bam, worked. Actually, I did have to unplug the SATA disks I had connected on the first bus (drives 0 and 1). Once I did that though, Windows 10 installed in about 15 minutes and I was back to setting up my apps and installing my games. Upgrading a HDD, even with reliable cloning methods, has always taken me about an hour. I was back and running at full speed in about half an hour. Very impressive.

This drive has been working great for the past two months or so. The only problem I had was that after I had moved into college, the OS that was installed (Windows 7 Pro 64-bit) had completely disappeared. No boot process or anything. This may have something to do with my motherboard, but regardless, after I did a complete reinstall it has been working seamlessly.

Used this to replace the original hard drive in my MacBook Pro mid 2012. It operates completely as it should. My Mac still runs like new and she’s nearly a decade old. I bought this hard drive in 2016. So it’s three years later and everything is still great.

In spite of the fact that specific programs to qualify HD performance – including Windows Checkdisk – reported that our disk were OK, I bought two of these SS disks – which are not disk anymore – to replace old, conventional spinning disks used to store programs and data in our computers. We planned to clone the existing disks and replace the old disks, using a program provided by W. Digital and created by Acronis, to carry out such task. According to the instructions, the operation was supposed to be very easily accomplished. As simple as: Install SSD, clone existing, replace existing and that’s all. Well, in my personal experience, that was not at all that easy. To begin with, the SSD were not detected automatically by Windows; even using Windows Administrative Tools it was not immediate for the OS to recognize them completely. The SSD had to be formatted, and the formatting should be exactly the same as the original disk to be cloned, for the cloning be possible. The instructions provided by the cloning program are really minimal. I had to try a number of tricks and different setups to make the OS see the disks, and the cloning program do they job. However, once I solved all the inconveniences – which probably were due to problems in our computers caused by the original HD which were far more defective than reported by supervisory programs, the performance of the computers improved immensely. The change in performance of our computers was worth all the perspiration, time and trials that I had to go through in order to make the system work as expected. If the performance of the computers does not deteriorate with time, and the SSD are dependable and have a reasonable long life, I strongly recommend this product.

what is your priority ? if money is it, this price is good for 500 GB. do you need FAST ? this is a tricycle, samsung 850 is a Harley1200, SAMSUNG 960 M.2 is a missile. whats your workload, how fast do you need to go & how much can you afford to get there? SAMSUNG 960 M.2 NVME is my OS & DAW choice samsung 850 is my secondary programs & Main Libraries choice this is my Secondary Libraries & good working storage choice a 7200 rpm Hybrid HDD usb3.1 is my archive choice its your money, how fast do YOU need to go?? & how much time do you have to get there ? this is great for fun & games; but a fast all day workhorse over a long hard haul ? whats your priority?

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)

Installed in a I3 driven Acer 4830T with 6gig ram. It cost $20 dollars to get the Win7 recovery disks from Acer. I started to worry that the drive wasnt working right because the reinstallation took about 2 hours. After the install/updates were done all I can say is wow! Dont forget to go to the WD website and download the dashboard software. You dont need this for the drive to work but it does verify it is working. Power up takes 20 seconds and a complete restart is only 1 minute. Now if I could just remember why I need a computer at home with my tablet and phone being so fast.

What do you say about a hard drive? It works or it doesnt. This drive went into my new computer build as my system drive and has performed perfectly. My system boots and loads very quickly. I bought Western Digital for 3 reasons - their reputation, past experience with WD drives and their warranty. The WD SSD Dashboard software gives detailed information about the status of your drive and lots of additional information. I always recommend Western Digital drives because of their reliability.

The WD Blue M.2 500GB works well. When formatted the capacity is not 500GB, it is more like 480GB. The SSD seems fast enough. I am using the SSD in an Intel NUC I5 that I use as a media server. I have no disk problems. I use the Resource Monitor to monitor the CPU and disk activity a lot while recording TV programs. I havent done any speed tests. It is just a lot faster than a hard drive.