WD Blue Solid State Drive

Excellent product which works as promised, and sped up my computer by a factor of at least 10x. Came excellently packaged, but didnt come with the screw to use on the motherboard to hold it in place. I was able to put into my board slot and push it down into position, but I had to go get a screw that fit to use it. Once I plugged it in on my Acer Aspire, I had some issues making it the boot drive, but now works perfectly as the boot drive, and I made the original drive I had a large storage drive.

I like everything about this SSD. It is moderately priced and is a very good value. I simply restored from my fully licensed Acronis backup on my three Windows10 Dell E6410 laptops. Everything runs quicker than with the HDDs. Why wait for a disk crash? Smarter to get ahead of probabilities and implement the SSD.

This drive is great. The only problem I had was that my MS Office had to be reactivated, and that is not the fault of the drive; but Microsoft. My laptop runs a bit smoother now. I dont have long boot times and logins any longer, and this drive is loaded with even more software than the one I cloned it from. Processes happen a whole lot faster. I have been a WD fan for a while, so Im glad this drive did not disappoint. Ill be back as these drives become an even more affordable standard.

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.

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.

Replaced the system drive for a PC and the drive for a MacBook Pro (Mid 2012). The PC was a custom but but older gaming rig. Had two WD Raptor 10K in RAID 0. The MS system benchmark rated the drive performance as a 6.0. With the SSD the measure went up to 7.4. While an arbitrary number the improvement was significant. Especially in boot times. General gaming performance is also faster. The MacBook also benefited with the upgrade in boot time. Installation and formatting to Apple system was no problem. Since I had the necessary EFI upgrade installation of the OS was also very straightforward. However, the disk usage hasnt been as dramatic an improvement. Mostly because my use is less disk intensive on the MacBook comported to the PC. Battery and such are well improved. One note, there is a feature called TRIM that will not be enabled in macOS. This feature improves read/write efficiency. Google the term, TRIM support mac OS SSD and look for the howtogeek page. Explanations and procedure there. All in all a very good upgrade. And a little subversive act of defiance since the disk says PC SSD and it slides nicely into the mac.

I bought this SSD in April 2017 and in January 2018, 9 months later, the drive started to fail and it would refuse to boot up on any inserted computer. I called an RMA and they processed the RMA within 2 days and I received the replacement a week later. However, the SSD that they sent me was not functional. So I called again this time support was worse. I called them on a weekend and they said that the SSD department was closed so I called back on Monday and they kept transferring me until eventually they told me that they would call me back within 2 hours. About 3 hours later I call them back because they never called and they put me on hold for 30 minutes until they found someone from the SSD department. The support is sent overseas so unfortunately its very difficult to understand their accent. I try my best but they get frustrated because I keep asking them to repeat some things that I didnt quite understand. I decided to purchase a Samsung EVO SSD because Ive been without a functional drive for more than a month and the Samsung SSD booted up fine without issues. Im sitting here hours later waiting for them to send me an email. Never again WD, Never again.

Excellent product! I bought two so I could upgrade both drives in my custom Toshiba Satellite P500. Works like a charm, and am very happy with the boosted performance. Space was another big upgrade - I went from two drives totaling 530 Gb storage space to nearly 2 Tb with this pair. I would recommend them to anyone looking to upgrade to SSD. I plan to buy a couple more so I can make the same upgrades in my desktop PCs. Ive always had very good luck with Western Digital products over the years, and these have been no exception! A++!

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.

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.