SAMSUNG 850 EVO 500GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-75E500B/AM)

Future really is the SSD it is faster and more quiet. I have this as my boot and have since order 2 more TB to put my games and other applications in. Goal is to have mainly SSD with A HD as backup.

Perfect replacement for that old hard drive. Funny, Best Buy Geek Squad said they did not think it would work so I did it myself. Got spoiled with the 10 second boot and 5 second shut down of my laptop so converted my desktop with this solid state drive and WOW - blistering fast. Amazing transformation.

Installed in a friends machine a few years back, still running fast and efficient with no problems that Im aware of. Proven technology and reliability, and still near the top of the heap for performance. Pros: Reliability, performance Con: expensive

This has been mentioned before by other commentators. It will not happen in all cases, but Samsung needs to fix the 850 firmware. Like the 840 EVO, Samsung has firmware flaws in their products that have shown that while it makes really GREAT hardware – it’s software / firmware programming capabilities are very subpar. Initialization of this product has a very peculiar software / firmware series of flaws that makes it appear dead on arrival under certain conditions. The 850 EVO is shipped unallocated and unformatted also; but that’s not the flaw – it’s the startup timing and conditions. I have no doubt Amazon has taken back a bunch of these as dead on arrival as a return – when they are not, they just won’t initialize correctly on many machines because of a firmware flaw. I have owned the 830’s, 840’s, and before --- this is the first time I have seen this nonsense. Make sure you have no other drive occupying the drive letter after the current last hard drive – such as a BluRay or CD ROM. There are other conditions that will cause it not to work. You must initially connect it by a USB connector to an external USB port, and Samsung does NOT provide the connector – although it’s start-up guide shows it. Once you can get it working, it should work fine and be a real screamer in terms of speed. This is why Samsung has lost to Apple. Samsung makes some of the best physical hardware in the world, I own lots of it – but it falls FLAT when it comes to programming firmware and software. Samsung hardware is often superior – Apple even uses it’s parts. Yet it’s software / firmware abilities are riddled with rookie flaws. Even its Magician Software can’t recognize a good portion of its own Samsung products. I’m sure there will be some re-comment posts from those who say I’m all wet because I am “stupid”, which is what most IT professionals consider users to be. I have over 30 years actual experience in these matters and this type of firmware flaw should not exist – and should have clearly been caught by Samsung. Better yet, ship the drives formatted.

I absolutely love this thing. Went from a 5-10 minute Windows startup boot (from complete shutdown) to a 15 second completed startup boot. Read/write speeds are super fast, and its COMPLETELY worth the investment.

This SSD has worked like a dream since I installed it on my laptop and after 2 months Ive had zero issues. My laptop boots up in under 5 seconds and my files are opened quicker than I can blink.

In an effort to get more wear out of my 6 year old SONY VAIO, I managed, with the help of a friend to install this new hard drive and although Ive only been using my computer for one day, its so much faster than it was previously. I really didnt think it would make such a difference, but now Im a believer. Good product.

My WEI used to be 5.9 before installing this SSD 500GB. Back when I bought my Alienware Aurora R4 4 years ago, Dell wanted $400 for a 250GB SSD, and I didnt want to pay that. Now, the SSDs are twice the storage for less than half the money! Yay! Installation was tough for a hard drive. It came with instructions, but I had no clue what it was talking about, so I just followed online general instructions and everything worked like it says. I first had to put the SSD on its mount, which wasnt easy because the screws are so small, they kept falling off. But eventually I got it in there. I moved my old hard drive over, then installed Windows 7. (Dell was selling Windows 8 at the time I purchased my computer, but I made them put in Windows 7 instead). At some point, I had to convert MBR partition to GPT. Then, the reinstallation disk keeps rebooting from DVD, and I had to take the DVD out during the installation rebooting so that it doesnt do that. But eventually, Windows got installed, and the computer is starting so fast now! Whats more, my Windows Experience Index is 7.8 out of 7.9! My Alienware is my dream computer. It looks like a space ship, and now it runs like one! (I know the WEI is outdated, but Ive always wanted a high score anyway!)

I have a really old laptop that was having trouble booting. I could get it to boot when it was warmed up and then it ran fine. I had installed Windows 7 Ultimate on it. Tried to update to W-10 but the update failed. A tech I know suggested it might be the system board. So, I ordered a replacement and my son installed it. No change in behavior. So, we finally realized that the problem was that the hard drive was not spinning up fast enough to be ready when the boot program was looking for it. Which is why it could boot on a reboot but not on the first try when the hard drive hadnt spun up yet. So, thinking that an SSD drive would never have a slow spin-up issue, I ordered the Samsung 850 EVO 500GB 2.5-Inch SATA III drive from Amazon. While I was waiting for it, I reinstalled W-7 and activated it. Then I upgraded to W-10--which went smoothly on top of the fresh W-7 installation. When the SSD drive arrived I put it into an enclosure that I had previously purchased to hold a drive from a ruined laptop and plugged it into a USB port. If you dont have a spare enclosure, I suggest ordering the USB to SATA cable that should be suggested as other customers bought. Then I installed the Samsung cloning software from the included DVD/CD. Note: I first tried to install all from the navigator and it only installed the Magician software which was useless for cloning. The cloning software updated itself to the latest version during the install and I then initiated the copy from the internal hard drive to the external SSD drive. After the copy completed, I simply replaced the internal hard drive with the new SSD drive and booted up. Thats it. It was a no hassle 5 star installation. BTW, the old laptop has a SATA II interface so the backward compatibility is flawless. And it boots much faster than from the disk.

The boot up time after installing this is like night and day compared to conventional disk drive. Also is more impervious to shock. Working good so far