WD Blue Solid State Drive

My Hitachi operating hard drive on my 12 year old Gateway crashed .. replaced it with his WD Blue SSD (restored from Acronis). So Far I am happy with the operation of the new drive ... will have to see if it will last as long as the original drive did..

Updated to 4-stars from 2 [3/26/17] So after a few emails with WD Support instead of just sending this back to Amazon, I took it upon myself to do a long format on this SSD. Long format in that I unchecked the Quick Format box.. I popped in my Kingston HyperX 120gb, reinstalled Windows for like the 3rd time that week, and did a format of this WD Blue. When everything was done, I opened up the WD Dashboard, and bam! Everything is good! Status says drive is good and the firmware updated. Speed is up to where it should be - passing my Kingston in 4 of 6 categories. SO just watch out, that you might have to format it right out of the box! Left off 1 star because of that fact.. - - - - - - - I bought this to replace the 2 SSDs I had been running - one with OS and other with Adobe Suite and a few select games [Skyrim, which is slow loading on HDD]. The idea of having just one SSD and one less drive overall was great - coupled with the great reputation of WD Blue, how could you go wrong?! Well, installing it and plopping Windows 7 on it is where things went wrong. The first attempt at installing Win7 went ok for a week or two. Then suddenly the whole system came unglued... . It dropped to a slow performance and a literal 4 minute boot time. Not having any of that, I did a fresh wipe and tried it again. This time it boots at normal speed, as Ive since isolated the problem driver, but this drive still preforms pretty slow. Looking up some benchmark/performance testing software, I ended up with a good ol fashion UserBenchmark, and even that confirmed my system was about half the beast it was pre-WD Blue. I attached a screen shot of a drive-specific test for you to see how abysmal it really was! Barely better than my aging Toshiba 2TB HDD! The 2nd Windows7 install on this Blue drive gave the proper 20-30 second boot time, but then quickly started having lags in window response times, desktop response times, and overall Explorer.exe responsiveness. Really?! Doing some more searching on SSD-optimizing software, I found that WD actually released a Dashboard for their new SSD line. That wouldve been nice to know right off the bat... So I installed it and immediately it tells me the drive is bad. Great... There was also a Firmware update. ...Great, one more piece of equipment that needs to be kept up-to-date. Then it tells me its not compatible with my system. What?? Its not a driver incompatibility, its the drive. Since when is a hard drive not compatible with a computer system?!?! WHATT?! WesternDigital, I expected so much better from you! Looks like im returning it and putting back my HyperX 120gb. Only reason I give this WD Blue 2 stars is on the chance that I just happened to get a lemon. Otherwise its been a 0-1 star experience.

Easy install, needed 3rd party transfer software. There are several to choose from. Follow transfer instructions found many places on YouTube. Yes, there are usage life limits on SSD drives but if you are an average user it works out to be 20 years or so. When was the last time you had any computer part for even 10 years? Significant increase in computer speed, I mean really significant. Once it gets past the BIOS start and goes to Windows the boot is almost instantaneous, no more chugging and grinding through numerous apps to start. I dont think could go back to a spinning drive after this. By the way because of the nature of the beast the more empty room you keep on the drive the longer it will last. Keep at least 20% free and you will have a happy hard drive. If you are a techno weenie who over analyzes things then there are faster drives but at a much higher price and in reality you will never see any difference. Spend that extra money and just get a larger drive and you will be happier. YouTube will answer all more specific questions you have.

Bought 2 of these to bring new life to a couple of old laptops. Kept my old operating systems and cloned & partitioned them for Linux Mint as a second system using the free version of Minitool. Both laptops work perfect with this drive and the newer one with a faster interface & CPU runs at least 5 times faster than with its old mechanical drive. They barely get warm and I havent had a computer freeze or blue screen since installing them. They will probably outlive the machines I put them in so when that time comes, they will be re-purposed to another machine.

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.

Cloned a 250GB 7200RPM HDD to this 500GB SSD running Win7 and Office 2010, as a test to see if ther was a decent speed improvement. 3.5 min boot time is now 40 sec, 50 sec Outlook load time is now 8 sec. Best computer investment Ive ever made, no doubt. Just bought 2 more to install in my parents computers so they stop frickin opening 11 frickin instances of Outlook every frickin time they start them because they keep clicking the frickin icon thinking the frickin computer is frickin ignoring them or some frickin thing and then complaining to me about how frickin slow the frickin computers are which makes me want to bang my frickin head on the frickin desk.

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.

Now, I cant actually say much as to how it fairs against other SSDs as this is the first Ive ever used. Howerver, after 5 years of putting off upgrading my main gaming system to an SSD, I am NOT disappointed. Boot times improved 70%, framefrates increased 5-10% depending on the game and are also MUCH more stable. Load times are incredible, and its really light. Do some research, buy the right SSD for you, but this one is worth the purchase if you decide. WD has been my go-to company for years on HDDs, and their SSDs do not disappoint.

Whats not to like? Your computer will run twice (or more) as fast, cloning software (downloaded from WD website) was quick and easy, installation on my Dell Inspiron One was simple and only took a 1/2 hour to complete, quiet operation and works with less power. Rebooted with no hitch. Just remember to buy a USB 3.0 to 2.5 SATA III Hard Drive connector with the SSD as you will need this to clone your drive. Super product ... well done WD!

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.