WD Blue Solid State Drive

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.

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.

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.

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.

Putting this WD SSD in my wifes 1 year old i7 laptop finally woke that thing right up. Before that, she pretty much refused to even use it, much preferring my 6 yr old i5 laptop, with its retro-fitted Samsung SSD, since that old thing was vastly outperforming her new one! Now I finally have my old laptop back! The cloning software, from WDs websight worked perfectly to copy her original HD & OS over to the new SSD, along with the use of a portable SATA HD enclosure that I already had on hand. Those inexpensive enclosures are really worth buying, anytime you upgrade to an SSD, since you can then use your original drive as a removable drive or for an OS & file back up.

Bought this one for games from my Steam library to cut down on load times. Didnt cut it down by much, but definitely gave me reduced load times.Dont remember which games it was exactly-- I had TERA, CS:GO, RAGE, Aion, Mortal Kombat X, maybe Team Fortress 2, other stuff like that-- larger-scale games along the lines of modern First-Person Shooters, action-MMORPGs and 3D-graphics-style 2D Fighting Games... Right now Im using it primarily for ARK: Survival Evolved and I can generally finish map loading on my best friends ARK server (on the Ragnarok map, somewhere between Day 3300 and Day 3600 in terms of ingame day/night cycles elapsed, and hes been building a lot) in about 25 to 35 seconds tops. Havent had any hardware trouble with it so far and its been installed for at least a half a year. I named it ARK Drive with Windows 10s drive management in a nod to the storyline in RAGE.

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.

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.

Fast little M.2 Drive. I say its fast, its an SSD, its not limited by the sata cable. it will run as fast as your PCIe lanes will allow. So there are no restrictions. This M.2 drive was purchased to replace a smaller 2.5 SSD, and also to clean up some wiring inside my computer case. eliminated another power and sata cable. Is it faster than my 2.5 SSD, i dont know, It feels like boot times have decreased by a second maybe 2. Overall its a perfect budget M.2 SSD for a main drive, backup storage or just want it just because. This is my main drive in my PC, paired with a 240GB PNY 2.5 SSD and a 1TB WD Blue HDD. Love WD, their products have yet to fail me.

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.