WD Blue 2TB M.2 SATA SSD with up to 560MB/s read speed

Bought this SSD (500Gb M.2 Blue) to upgrade a new laptop I had bought, a HP Gaming 15 which only came with a 1tb mechanical drive and was sluggish in Windows, but otherwise the specs were great for a low end gaming laptop. (I5 8300h, 16gb Ram, GTX1050Ti £600 US to UK import). Installation was a breeze, and after booting to the drive and installing the OS the machines responsiveness has increased exponentially. The machine went from 1m15s boot time to around 8s. Windows and apps now open instantly where as from the 1tb mechanical drive it could sometimes take 3-5 seconds to open certain windows or apps. This drive series (Blue) is a great mid range, mid price product designed more towards faster random read/write performance than the WD Green series which is more designed towards power saving and efficiency. Both have similar large file transfer speeds but the Blue edition have much quicker random read/write speeds which is more beneficial in an OS environment. If you need balls to the wall performance then the Black series is the one to go for, albeit with an increased price tag. These current series of blue M.2 drives have also just been replaced with newer quicker line of products carrying the same product names, but again at an increased cost. For price / performance these Blue series drives hit the sweet spot especially for boot drives where you'll be storing your operating system.

I have a HP Envy X360 15XXXX which came with a 128 M.2 SATA SSD (C:) with the system drive on and a standard 1TB 2.5" SATA drive (D:). I initially configured it so that the bulk of installed app files went to D: drive with only the essential ones going to C: drive. However, two and a half years on and C: was quite full. I decided to go for I purchased the 500GB M.2 version of this drive, along with a Sabrant M.2 SSD 2.5inch SATA III Aluminium enclosure adapter (EC-M25A). I already had a WAV Link dual bay SATA III disk cloner which will also act an external drive bay. I downloaded a free version of AOMEI Backupper for copying. For managing the disk, I used two built in utilities - Windows Powershell - needed to remove partitions. Windows Disk Management (Found under computer management in Control Panel). This is used firstly to mount the new disk and give it a drive letter. I suspect some who reported the disk DOA failed to do this. Also for managing the partition sizes. I proceeded as follows: 1. Having created recovery disks, the recovery partition was obsolete as it is a one-time deal creating the media. I used HP recovery manager to delete the partition - except it doesn't, it just deletes the data. 2. I used Powershell to delete the partition and there are instructions here if you don't know how to do it https://www.windowscentral.com/how-delete-drive-partition-windows-10 3. I inserted the new drive into the Sabrant adaptor, placed it in a bay of the WAV Link SATA bays and connected it to the USB 3 port. (There us a USB-C version of the adaptor to connect directly to a USB C port if you don't have a dive bay) 4. The drive is not detected in Windows until it has been mounted, so I opened Disk Management > Storage and found the unmounted drive. I right clicked and used the wizard to do a basic mount and assign it F: Drive. 5. I opened AOMEI Backupper and selected the clone option from the left-hand side. I selected the Disk Clone option from the bottom row. 6. On the next screen, I selected Disk 0 - the one with Windows on - as the source disk. 7. On the next screen, I selected Disk 2 - the new disk and the destination. Hit OK and it took less than 10 minutes to clone. 8. I then opened Disk Management and found the cloned volume at 118GB with around 350 GB of unallocated disk. 9. I right clicked on the cloned windows partition and selected 'Extend Volume' and allocated the maximum available space and the new window volume increased to 465GB. I removed it from the adaptor. 10. I turned of the Laptop, removed the rear cover and disconnected the battery by removing all the screws and lifting out. 11. I then located the current disk, removed the screw and replaced it with the cloned disk. 12. I reconnected the battery, replaced the cover and booted up the machine. There was a pause and a message as the BIOS had detected the hardware change. It then rebooted through to windows and everything looked hunky-dory. 13. The I ran all major applications and everything was sweet. It was as if I had done nothing, except the was an appreciable increase in speed, especially on boot up. and Windows hello was working great every time - it had started to hang and drop to PIN access. The disk has been sweet since Monday (now Thursday) and I am considering up grading the D: to an SSD as well. So far - very happy. I am of course keeping the Old disk safe . . . . just in case!

Its over a year since I bought it and its still working

This M.2 has been amazing in my pc and I have been using this M.2 for a couple of years now. Highly recommend this item if you are on a budget and would like a small M. 2 storage.

I bought this M.2 SATA SSD to replace the 5400rpm mechanical hard drive in a laptop. As someone whose never installed an SSD before, I cloned the old drive to it quite easily using the free version of Macrium Reflect (with the help of a YouTube tutorial), installed the drive with no problems, and everything booted up successfully. Yay me! I'm going with 4 stars rather than 5, as it has not made quite as big a difference to Windows boot up speeds as I expected. Everything does load up a bit faster - but not hugely so. If anything, the increase in battery life from the new SSD is more noticeable than the improvement in boot speeds. As others have noted, you need a screw to install the SSD and this is not included. If you don't have one on your motherboard, the Dell website will currently sell you a single M2 screw for 35p delivered - the only place I've found where you can buy them individually.

I picked one of these up to use in a Mini ITX build that has limited space for 2.5" or 3.5" drives. I wanted something large capacity that I could use in the M.2 slot to take full advantage of it. SPEED / GENERAL Nothing too technical here as the super specific details don't matter that much to me generally - its very fast, just like any standard SSD. Not NVME speeds however at a certain point you get diminishing returns on speed (is 8 seconds to boot to Windows instead of 10 seconds really worth spending twice the cash?) and I'd much rather have a 1TB thats still pretty fast than a 500GB for the same price. Windows boots quickly, games load quickly, Adobe software loads quickly - nothing more I could want. I have a 2019 MacBook Pro that are well known for having super fast SSDs however in all honesty I've hardly noticed any difference when booting Adobe on both the machines. OVERALL For the £115 this cost me it is an excellent drive and I'd buy one again any day of the week. 5/5.

This model has a very good price per GB. Usage examples below are true for any SSD, it's just that this model in particular make it easier to buy higher storage capacity. - 250GB/500GB is enough to put your system/standard apps on it, you just need good partitioning and data management. - 1TB allows you to go full SSD, literally replacing your HDD and sometimes external SSD (useful when you have many AAA games or raw movie files) - 2TB is quite extreme, in general you'd buy a 1TB first and then another one for your second M.2 slot if you need more e.g. a dual boot. In my case though, the 1st slot was already filled with a 250GB SSD, which was a bit small to contain a Windows system and multiple versions of various game engines (especially Unreal Engine). Performance is good overall, but I haven't tried different models of SSD with the same OS, so I'm not sure how it compares to others. As with other M.2 SSDs you'll find on the market, note that the M.2 screw is *not* included, and you may need to buy a pack from a specialist store. In my case, I could not find one though, so I recycled a screw I picked somewhere else in my computer, and that had a similar size to an M.2 (replacing that screw with a standard screw that happened to fit). Once you have the screw, you can install it with very little force.

I bought this to go in a Dell G3 laptop that comes with a SATA based M.2 slot but had only a 1TB hard disk in it. It wasn't a quick hard disk either and installing games and updates meant I was waiting ages before I could join in on the weekly gaming activity with my friends. Having verified my laptop had the right type of M.2 SATA slot, I bought this and migrated Windows and all my programs over to this and kept my hard disk for just file storage. The performance difference is just staggering. One game that took about 4 minutes to load, now loads in 15 seconds. Most improvement gains in terms of loading up is a similar factor of improvement. When checking suitability of M.2 SATA products it is important to note than there are two principle formats; SATA type and NVMe type and they have slightly different pins. The NVMe type are much faster because they connect through the PCIe bus, whereas the SATA type uses the old serial bus which has a maximum throughput. The two different chips are slightly different and it is important to make sure you know which type of slot your computer has. Moving from mechanical hard disks to SSD type storage is one of the most effective ways of increasing performance. Whilst your processor is still the same speed, all files can be fetched and modified much more quickly.