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.

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.

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.

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.

I got this SSD HD to replace and improve (The orginal HD was a Western Digital 1 TB WD Blue SATA II 5200 RPM 8 MB Cache) the performance issues that this laptop had been having which was mainly due to the growing resource demands over the years from the newer Windows Operating Systems (Going from Windows 7 to Windows 10) and the newer requirements from the current software as well. Once I installed the new SSD the difference was literally night and day, the boot up from Bios to Operating System (Windows 8.1) was almost literally instantaneous (I would say 10 to 15 seconds), the response time on applications and any action in general was also instantaneous. Only recommendation I would make is to make sure the BIOS on your laptop/PC is current so there are no compatibility issues with the SSD. Overall I could not be happier, This will unfortunately will be that last upgrade that I will be able to do this Laptop (and my Wifes Dell XPS laptop, they are both the same age and most specs are the same) since I have literally maxed out all up-gradable areas on this Laptop (See the system system specs below). I would highly recommend this SSD Hard Drive. Specs: HP Pavilion dv8t-1200 Entertainment Laptop (June 2010) OS: Windows 8.1 Enterprise Processor: Intel I7 Core @ 1.60 GHz (1st Generation) RAM: 8 GB (Max Capacity) Hard Drive: 500GB WD-Blue SSD2TB Seagate traditional Sata Drv (Storage) Video: Nvidia GeForce GT 230M (HDMI & VGA) Display: 1920 X 1080p 18.4 inch Screen Internal NIC: 1GB WiFi NIC: Internal Intel Centrino Dual Band/USB LB1 AC600 Dual Band USB Dongle (5 ghz) USB Ports: 3 X USB 2.0 Ports ROM: Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Burner

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.

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.

Bought this 250gb M.2 SSD for my new PC build. Have been more than a week since Ive installed it. This thing is crazy fast. Dont have any software/hardware complains. I have a couple of WD external hard drives and they havent failed me so far (*knocks on wood so hard*) so I can trust the product. Couple of tips: - It might not recognize the SSD right away so try looking it up in the BIOS before starting the PC and become disappointed on a broken product. - If you are planing on installing it right away, youll need the screw that it might had come with the motherboard. If not, try to buy it at the same time because this M.2 doesnt bring one... also get the screwdriver now that you are into it. - Make sure that your motherboard accept this M.2 SSD length. Check your Specs! All in all this was a great acquisition so far... (*keeps knocking on wood as hard as I can!*).

This easily installed in my laptop. if your laptop has an NVMe M.2 port, Id use something else. But if your M.2 port is only SATA 3, this works very good. My read speeds were 545MB/s and read was 508MB/s. Overall I am happy with this, but I was disappointed that the drive only had 931 free GB.

Beyond useless. Spent 8 hours speaking with customer service based overseas that finally resulted in the corruption of my hard drive from using the Acronis software. No one I spoke with was properly trained all being largely ignorant in the basics of computing. What they excelled in is the use of delaying tactics After downloading the software 3 times, twice from links supplied by customer service I eventually obtained a copy of the application that recognized the attached Western Digital drive. First attempt resulted in the laptop hanging but which Western Digital Customer Service insisted may be executing correctly. Despite the facts that the keyboard and mouse became unresponsive and HHD / SSD activity lights registered no activity. First was told that it was not abnormal for a computer to remain in this state for 1 to 2 hours and not to interrupt it as it may cause damage . After waiting for this period of time spoke with Customer Service again and was told to wait up to 2 to 3 hours, 4 hours be even better. In the next call was told to force the laptop to restart and try cloning the drive again. This time the application did not hang in the very beginning and began the cloning process. After 30 minutes found the laptop turned off. Restarted the laptop and now the Acronis software boots up the laptop not Windows 10. The Acronis software does not recognize any drives in the laptop and every time it restarts with the Acronis operating system. Customer Service said there was nothing they could do to help me and directed me to contact the laptop manufacturer. I explained that was not satisfactory and was eventually given a toll free number to contact Western Digital in the USA. If anything this experience was even worse! The young lady told me outright there was nothing she could do to help. Every attempt I made to escalate the problem was met with being put on hold then being told the department or person was not available. She offered to take my information and said someone may or may not call me back. Told her I was willing to remain on hold until someone was available was told she was not allowed to do that and would have to disconnect the call which she did. I have recommended and sworn by this companys products for decades but after today will never purchase anything from them again be it as simple as pencil and paper to record my data. I have worked in the computing industry for 30+ years and this experience ranks as the worse to date. Fortunately the financial loss is limited to the laptop and data on it. Under no circumstances would I recommend this product regardless of the consumers level of expertise in computing.