WD Blue Solid State Drive

Anything by WD is good. Still going strong.

Im getting an average of only 166.4 MB/s out of this drive right now, however I put it into an aged Gateway NV44 that uses DDR2 PC6400, with a slower SATA 3Gb/s header & a T4300 processor that is not a power house. Start times are much faster, making for a more responsive system despite the older interfaces & slower memory.

This drive saved my Lenovo Q150 from the scrap heap. I was looking for a solution for a tiny home theater computer and had this old computer stuck in a drawer because it was so slow. I tried upgrading the RAM but that was only marginal improvement. When I cloned this drive from the original 5400 rpm Western Digital Blue in the Q150 and installed it, it breathed new life into little PC. It is now quick and responsive and allows me to stream blu-ray quality movies from my NAS. Is this the fastest out there? No, but you will definitely see a difference from any spinning drive.

I picked up a couple of these when they were on sale. I have to say that I am very impressed with this SSD. I wasnt expecting it to be as fast as a Samsung EVO, but I was pleasantly surprised. I ended up putting one of them in an HP AiO computer that was incredibly slow, and now it is like a new machine. I also put one in a family members laptop as she was complaining it was slow. I cloned her hard drive to the SSD and put the SSD in the laptop, and she says that she is glad she didnt purchase a new laptop. I also put two in my server that runs VMWare. I used one to use as an SSD Datastore for OS partitions, and the other I use for Flash Read Cache on my Plex server. I can now say that I will look at Western Digital Blue SSDs when purchasing more SSD space. It has thoroughly surprised me.

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 bought this SSD in April 2017 and in January 2018, 9 months later, the drive started to fail and it would refuse to boot up on any inserted computer. I called an RMA and they processed the RMA within 2 days and I received the replacement a week later. However, the SSD that they sent me was not functional. So I called again this time support was worse. I called them on a weekend and they said that the SSD department was closed so I called back on Monday and they kept transferring me until eventually they told me that they would call me back within 2 hours. About 3 hours later I call them back because they never called and they put me on hold for 30 minutes until they found someone from the SSD department. The support is sent overseas so unfortunately its very difficult to understand their accent. I try my best but they get frustrated because I keep asking them to repeat some things that I didnt quite understand. I decided to purchase a Samsung EVO SSD because Ive been without a functional drive for more than a month and the Samsung SSD booted up fine without issues. Im sitting here hours later waiting for them to send me an email. Never again WD, Never again.

Did a fresh install of win10 on my old trusty laptop that was taking upwards of 20 mins from power on to usable on this drive. It now starts up super fast, is usable in less than 2 minutes, and has restored life to my laptop so I can continue to use it. Highly recommend.

This SSD is connected to an older motherboard with SATA 2, this will give only about 60 % of the possible speed increase. However, still more speedy then my normal hard drive. Cloned the OS, but does not work as booth device because of apparently corrupted files. Maybe will do a clean re-install of Windows 10. For now I use it to store games who benefits from faster loading times and smoother game play. Installation is simple after purchasing an adapter for an 3.5 disk bay. Currently prices are still too high for SSDs. I assume they will come down more over time.

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 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.