WD Blue Solid State Drive

If you think Im going to parrot what everyone else seems to saying about this drive....youd be right. I was going to dump a 5 year-old gen 3 i7 laptop because it had become exasperatingly slow. Then I dropped this drive and another stick of RAM into the case, and it screamed to life like a warbird. Its now booting in about a third of the time it used to take. I honestly felt as if Id come home with a brand new laptop. If youre on the fence about getting this drive, my sage advice is GET IT! Hey, it can only do so much, and when a computer is old, then buy a new one. But this drive may extend the life of your current computer for a few more years, and save you money and frustration in the process.

When I got this hard-drive, it looked so small, I almost felt cheated, but its a real-deal 500GB hard drive thats super fast and far more reliable than a standard unit, since its solid state. I tried to get a frame that I could use in my PCs (FX 6800) removable-drive-bay PC, but couldnt get one that positioned the drive correctly. Thankfully, its so small and light, it plugs into the port and sits there without strain. Its easy to format and works flawlessly.

Just added this 500GB WD Blue SSD to my custom build - a no-brainer really. Currently on my 2nd custom PC and it has (1) 4TB WD Black, (1) 500GB WD Blue, and (5) 4TB WD Reds. Western Digital makes the best products when it comes to storage. Ive used WD products in my 2 custom PCs Ive built. First computer I kept for 5 years with ZERO HDD or SSD issues.

For $89 it is an amazing upgrade to my 4 year old laptop. Between the ssd and eliminating bloatware boot time is about 10 seconds. My HP Pavilion G7s hdd crapped out and I needed a quick replacement so I ordered a new Dell Inspiron to replace it. I was searching for a cheap hdd replacement just to see if I could fix the old laptop and came across this ssd for $89. Expecting the install of the ssd and windows to be a big deal I set it aside until I had a full day to commit to the install. I had the drive mounted in less than 5 minutes and following instruction found on the internet I was able to reinstall Windows 10 very easily. Probably less than 30 minutes actually doing and maybe an hour or so downloading or installing. I cant say exactly how much time downloading or installing actually took because I got busy with other things while downloading and installing. I must comment that Microsoft did a great job making a clean reinstall really easy and free. Only down side is I prefer the old laptop now because with the ssd it is faster than the Inspiron... so the Inspiron was a waste of money since I only use it for backup on its 1.5 TB hdd at this point. I like the led display on the Inspiron better than the Pavilion so maybe when they get cheap enough Ill get a 1 TB ssd and try cloning the hdd in the Dell.

Good value for money. Now I can finally use my windows 10 computer without waiting forever for things to settle down. A little slower than expected when doing intensive seek operations. However, lightning fast moving large chunks of data. Overall a great product for the price.

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.

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.

Anything by WD is good. Still going strong.

I have multiple ssds in my PC I have my windows install on an Intel pcie nvme SSD then I have another SSD made by micron plus I have a Western Digital black which I use for storage. I decided I needed more space and I wanted it to be an SSD and I found this one for a good price it was easy to install and when I ran speed test on it it came very close to its specified performance level. You almost never get what they advertise but this drive comes Incredibly Close. For an example of its speed I loaded The Witcher 3 from this drive and it took seven seconds to boot up the game and get into the game from the menu. Then I tested it on the Western Digital black and it took much longer around 30 to 45 seconds to load up the level. Thats a significant difference especially because it has to load any time you die so with this drive its almost like theres no wait at all I definitely buy another one

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!