WD Blue Solid State Drive

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.

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.

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.

This drive wuld not recognized by wd10 operating system. I had to download a ssd/drive software from WD to format it then it would be recognized and works like a chamop. I wish seller would mention this problem. I thought something wrong with the 1st one after after installing it in different PC and Laptop; so I reurned and exchanged for a new one. This problem should be mentioned on the ads to save the buyer time and Amazon shipping fee!

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.

Laptop owners beware! Unless you have two bays/slots, for hard drives, you will not be able to use the downloaded Acronis software. It will not accept any drive in an enclosure to clone your HDD. This was confirmed by Western Digital when I gave up and finally called. Why would WD, promote this software product? Many or most buyers want to replace their laptop hard drive with an SSD. Which you cannot do with their software download? You will be directed to buy their high priced software upgrade. If you use any kind of enclosure, you will have to buy the extra software., I consider this to be misleading, as I came away with the belief that all I had to do was plug in and clone, wrong! Must be hidden somewhere in the fine print, I have yet to find. If you do decide to buy the software. It takes forever to download, then you get the message that the software, you just downloaded, is out of date! You need to re-download yet another version. Why cant Acronis software company, just have up to date downloads? Then when you try to contact Acronis, all I could find is a chat window, no telephone support. Frustration and anger is what to expect with this product! Get the Samsung, much better experience from top to bottom. What a waste of time for me and Amazon returns... Geeez Louise!

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.

So far so good. There are scores above which are accurate. The only reason I didnt give a 5 star is bc the material the case of the ssd is made of plastic. Its very cheap feeling. I have an intel and pny drive and they are heavier and seem more well built. Other than that its a great drive.

I bought this to install into a 2011 Macbook Pro and it made a world of difference on boot up speeds. Times easily increased by a good 10-15 seconds from when I turn on the computer until it is ready for logon at the desktop. Total time with the old hard drive was around 40 seconds from power on to desktop and login. The new SSD is around 15-20 seconds after power on to login and get to a desktop.

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.