Western Digital 500GB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s, M.2 2280, Up to 560 MB/s - WDS500G2B0B

Short versionPros:Has a DRAM CacheDecent performance and price for a midrange SSD5-year WarrantyCons:Non-discounted pricing is atrocious250G version is not the best dealLong VersionAs someone who frequently refurbishes old hardware others throw out, I tend to ignore the "midrange" of SSDs. Either I'll buy something ridiculously cheap (like that time when a 128G ADATA SU650 was at $16), or spend <$50 on a 256G NVMe and throw in a budget 500G SSD when they dip under $50 or an old hard drive. Generally I would stay away from the more "premium" SSDs since smaller capacities aren't that good of a deal, and as a student I would prefer to spend less on hardware that I'm not going to use daily. If it is hardware that I either care about or something I use heavily, I'll probably just go for something from Samsung, Micron, or a SK Hynix Gold when Woot puts it on a discount again.This time however, I had a 2012 Macbook Air where the original drive it came with was really showing its age, especially an unresponsive keyboard during login, so I decided I would swap out the drive while doing some overdue maintenance, using a SSD adapter for the 2012 Macbook Air. Compared to the original drive (which I forgot to take a screenshot of the test results), the sequential read performed better, from ~430MB/s to ~490MB/s with little change for sequential write. However, the system was quite smoother (less stutter that was caused by the drive), and even though it doesn't hit the advertised speeds, I'm still very happy with the upgrade.Generally the WD Blue is actually an SSD that I would recommend my friends to buy if they're on a bit more of a budget, just because it's not outrageously priced, the warranty and performance is pretty good from past experience, and it has a DRAM cache which makes it excellent for a boot drive. It's just not something I would buy normally because of the use scenarios I have. Would I recommend it? Yes, as long as you're not paying for more than ~$70 for the 500G version and you're not considering the smaller capacities. >$40 for a 250G SSD is a bit steep, and the only time when the 250G version became a good deal was when one of my friends bought it at $45 each on somewhere that's not Amazon (which is a horrible price), but they accidentally shipped him two drives and they got to keep both.

This is a great SSD. It's easy to install on an m.2 slot and works perfectly. It doesn't come with the screw and post so make sure you have that on hand before so you can install it without issues. You can get one on here or at your local high quality computer store like Fry's electronics. Anyway it does what it's supposed to do and my PC is booting up in mere seconds. I have one of the first mobos to have m.2 on it and it worked on it. Great value for the price. Get it!

I purchased an Acer E5-576-392H Laptop in December 2018. It came with 6GB RAM Memory and 1TB HDD. Well, it got to the point that the disk was operating at or about 100% all of the time. I did the usual disk defrags, clean-ups, antivirus things and everything I could find on YouTube. Nothing worked. Instead of trying my luck with the warranty, I decided to just spend the $65 for SSD card. As it turned out, the HDD was the issue. I now can completely reboot the system in 30 seconds and everything works very well. The installation only took about 10 minutes. The 500GB capacity is plenty for what I do, so I don't miss the 1TB HDD that was originally installed. Larger capacity SSD's are available if you need more.

I've purchased a number of these and so far none has given me any problems. I can't tell how long they will last over time, but so far it's been close to a year and everything's good. I don't have much to say about one SSD versus another because I'm comparing them to hard drives, which they exceed by orders of magnitude. Some of the very inexpensive SSD do have slower sustained write speeds, but when used as the boot drive for Windows or MacOS, access time is the critical factor, and in that respect all SSDs seem similar to me. In fact, I've noticed that NVMe SSDs, whose read speeds benchmark up to 6X faster than these SATA SSDs, barely feel much faster in practice when running an operating system, although I'm sure if I read or wrote a lot of multi-gigabyte files (I don't), the difference would be more noticeable. But even for large downloads, for example, a SATA SSD is still faster than even a fiber gigabit internet connection, so the speed improvements you might get with NVMe won't make a difference. BTW, you can buy similar but less expensive drives from other manufacturers, so if you'd like to save around $20, search Amazon for alternatives.

Wow!! I purchased this back in March 2019 for my ASUS Vivobook FS10UA which has a slow 1TB HDD. I primarily work on BI tools, databases and they all including Chrome crawled with the HDD. I bought this SDD having read that it would speed things a bit. Installed it, did the C drive cloning using Macrium Reflect, switched to booting from SSD and bang ... it didn't boot up. Tried for a couple of hours and finally took it out. Happened to switch jobs and move so never got to trying it again. Yesterday after my kids for the umpteenth time dissed my laptop for being slow I searched for the SSD, found it installed it and this time Bazinga!! The laptop is blazing fast. Like night and day. I was opening multiple File Explorer windows just because I could - something in the past I would dread to open.I believe any SSD would have done the job however, this WD one was highly rated and though Amazon was not sure if it was a good fit I read in the Q&A section people had success with this laptop model. I now look forward to using the laptop and frankly feel euphoric when I see it boot up in seconds used to be minutes with the HDD. If you are getting a laptop with HDD - treat yourself to an SSD. You will never hate your laptop.

Good quality SSD. A little pricey but competitively so. Always use a name brand for storage and critical components.