WD Blue Solid State Drive

Purchased for Sony Playstation 3 60GB original model, to expand storage and improve audio quality. I have read reviews of the performance differences these can make for gaming on the PS3, which is to say somewhat faster loading times, and thats about it. My goal in getting this was to expand storage, cut down on heat production (as the early models of PS3 produce enough heat to rival a small space heater), and most importantly, to drastically reduce one of the many sources of vibration within the console. I know not many people use the PS3 as an audiophile CD player, however there is a website for those who do, called PS3SACD, as the original model could play those high fidelity discs. I learned from the Mapleshade Records website that eliminating vibration as much as possible from your equipment provides clearer sound, so I wanted to try this drive to see if it would make a difference. While Im sure many consider the audiophile community to be a weird cult of kooks, and those within that community probably consider anyone using a PS3 as a source to be a sad case; everyone has a different life situation and for some of us this is what works well for our needs. I will just say that I perceived a noticeable improvement in sound quality with this drive installed. It was not a subtle difference. I also noticed enough heat reduction that the fan runs at lower speeds, making it easier to hear what Im playing (one of the major drawbacks to using the PS3 as a source). The gaming performance has changed little, as expected, with somewhat faster load times. I made sure to buy a SATA drive, not a SATA III, as the original drive is a SATA, and thats what the system is designed for. Overall, I can recommend SSDs for anyone who owns a PS3 in general, whatever your goals may be in replacing your HDD. I was happy that installing a SSD did what I had hoped to accomplish, but if you have other needs, just be aware that you wont achieve blazing speeds on the PS3 like you will in a laptop, and adjust your expectations accordingly. Another reason I can recommend this drive is that it was one of the most affordable ones I could find, which is what you would want for using in a PS3.

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.

Update: With regard to the WD Blue SSD.. Zero Noise compared to any platter hard drive. But that would be applicable to any SSD. Speed is as promised. I think once you go SSD, there is no turning back.. If anyone has the intention of imaging their current PC to a new PC with this drive, I would recommend the problem free EaseUS backup and system transfer. I unfortunately have tried the top 5 recommendation and all failed or had several learning curves which became to time consuming. For $29 the home version is all you need..

This is a product of WDs acquisition of SanDisk. Overall, this is a great mainstream SSD. While there are slightly faster ones to be had for quite a bit more money in everyday use for most people you wouldnt be able to tell the difference. Still a massive improvement over a rotating mechanical hard drive - this made my ThinkPad T430 go from a total dog (yay 5400RPM laptop hard drives) to nearly as fast as my Core i7 gaming/workstation laptop. So far this SSD has handled everything Ive thrown at it just fine - everything from simple stuff like browsing the internet to heavy virtualization workloads! Would 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!

What do you say about a hard drive? It works or it doesnt. This drive went into my new computer build as my system drive and has performed perfectly. My system boots and loads very quickly. I bought Western Digital for 3 reasons - their reputation, past experience with WD drives and their warranty. The WD SSD Dashboard software gives detailed information about the status of your drive and lots of additional information. I always recommend Western Digital drives because of their reliability.

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.

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.

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.