WD Blue Solid State Drive

When I got this hard-drive, it looked so small, I almost felt cheated, but its a real-deal 500GB hard drive thats super fast and far more reliable than a standard unit, since its solid state. I tried to get a frame that I could use in my PCs (FX 6800) removable-drive-bay PC, but couldnt get one that positioned the drive correctly. Thankfully, its so small and light, it plugs into the port and sits there without strain. Its easy to format and works flawlessly.

Works Great in my Dell Latitude E7470. I was very surprised to see that Dell only offered drives up to 500G in their Latitude Laptops. Thats not nearly enough space for an active field engineer. So I got this because of the WD Brand name as well as having no issues with their products in the past. I popped out the original drive, put this drive in, and used an external enclosure to transfer the original drives contents to this one. Worked perfectly from the start, Great Speed and no more worries about De-fragmenting. Flash drives are the Future people, and this is top of the line. Just remember, nothing is forever, so make sure to take complete and frequent backups

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.

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

I upgraded to this from a 750GB, 7,200RPM hard drive, and my boot time, which I didnt time either way, went from around 30-45 seconds, to around 5 seconds. 10 tops, from a cold boot to getting online and browsing the web. Its insane how much faster my computer is with this guy installed. I upgraded from an AMD dual core CPU with 4GB RAM to a Xeon quad core with 16GB of RAM, but while it was a faster computer, the boot and drive times really werent changed, because a hard drive can only spin so fast. Maybe there are better SSDs (I mean, Im sure anything with NVMe is going to be better) but if youre coming from a hard drive, this is a great first step.

Excellent drive for the money! Setup was a breeze using Macrium Reflect software to clone my drive (not included but they offer a free edition for home users). Windows 10 started without any issues at all. The speed is excellent compared to a standard hard disk. A few things to be aware of however: this drive does not include a SATA cable, power adapter, or mounting tray. Check to make sure if you need those first before ordering. Otherwise this is a perfect choice for those upgrading to an SSD and cannot afford a more expensive Samsung 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.

In recent years I have tried several different brands of SSDs, and I think this is the best one yet. On my newest Windows 7 computer (refurbished HP Compaq Elite 8300 SFF PC) I try as much as possible to keep my data (that changes quite often) on the D: drive, so my C: drive (the WD SSD) remains as lean as ever may be. I also carefully monitor which programs and services start up automatically with Windows. As currently configured, the C: drive has a total of 57GB occupied of the reported 232GB available. When I restart my computer, it is back up and ready to go in about 50 seconds from the time I initiate the restart. That kind of performance, and my years of happy experience with WD products, give me confidence that this WD SSD will prove to be a very worthwhile investment.

I first bought the WD 250 Blue M.2 SSD which arrived DOA as nothing would recognize it, even after talking to the WD support. Amazon gave me a very quick refund on the 250Gb, so I thought that I would give this 500 Gb drive a try. This replacement arrived very quickly and installed easily except for the small screw that holds the board in place. It installs on the motherboard between the large CPU cooler and the large video card. There was no way for me to get my hands in there to work, so I removed the video card and it was still a tight fit to access the mounting screw. After physically installing the WD Blue 500 Gb M.2 SSD, I downloaded the free (With a WD Drive) Acronis disk management software for cloning the existing Samsung SSD to the new drive; which ran without a hitch. This freed up a lot of space on drive C: and made both the boot time and program opening time almost instantaneous. If you have an available M.2 slot on your motherboard and wanting to speed up the boot and programs, I highly recommend installing one of these.

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.