Western Digital 1TB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s, 2.5"/7mm, Up to 560 MB/s - WDS100T2B0A

I bought this WD Blue 1TB SSD to replace the ancient slow running Samsung 1TB mechanical HD in my 2014 Dell Inspiron15R laptop, which literally took 10+ minutes to boot up and fully load the operating system. This new WD Blue 1TB SSD brought new life to my old machine. It boots up in <20 seconds, and is very snappy running programs. Read and write speeds were dramatically increased as well (e.g., it took 8 hours to create a system image of the old HD vs. 2 hours to image the new SSD). It was easy to physically install too (it was slightly thinner than my old HD, so I just put 2 tiny stick-on felt pads inside the HD bay for support, and it was good to go).>>The installation procedure that I used below worked flawlessly for me (I did not use the Acronis cloning software because my laptop only has one internal HD bay and Acronis advised not to clone an existing system drive to an externally connected USB drive-bay because the cloned drive may fail to boot):1. Created a system image of the original Samsung HD using the standard Windows 10 process in control panel (saved the system image to an external USB3 HD)2. Created a system start-up/repair boot DVD when prompted to do so after the system image creation process successfully completed (my laptop has a DVD burner in it, but you can make one with a USB jump drive too)3. Shut down the laptop and removed the battery4. Removed the bottom cover on the laptop and replaced the old HD with the new WD Blue 1TB SSD5. Reinstalled the battery and turned the laptop back on with the external USB3 HD connected6. After turning laptop back on it asked for a start-up boot disc since the new SSD was blank and un-initialized7. Inserted DVD and rebooted laptop to load the system start-up/repair program8. Selected 'restore drive from system image' on the menu and it automatically searched and found the previously created system image located on the external USB3 HD9. Started the restoration process, which took about an hour to finish10. After restoration process successfully completed, I removed the system boot DVD and restarted the laptop (as instructed by Windows)11. System booted up quickly with zero problems and everything was just like the original drive in every way, only much faster! I feared all sorts of drama upon start-up with the new SSD, but I was elated to see everything worked perfectly (all existing program product keys and iTunes account mapped over transparently)As for long term reliability, I cannot say because it’s only been a few days since I installed it, but I’ve had good luck with WD products over the years (after successful SSD installation I went to WD's website and filled out the warranty registration online). The speed increase and low power consumption make this SSD an excellent upgrade from older slow HD’s. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

I am writing this review after 3 years of purchase.I bought this WD Blue 1TB SSD back in June 2022, and after three years of daily use, I can confidently say it’s been a fantastic investment. My laptop is almost never shut down—it’s constantly running with multiple applications open, and this SSD has handled everything smoothly and reliably.Boot times are still fast, programs open instantly, and I haven’t experienced any slowdowns or failures. The drive runs cool and silent, and it’s clearly built to last. I haven’t even had to think about it since installation—which is the best kind of tech experience.If you’re looking for a dependable, high-performance SATA SSD, I highly recommend this one. It’s been rock-solid for me even under heavy and near-constant use.

A must-have SSD for an older computer.I finally got around to installing this WD SSD in my 2012 quad-core i7/16GB Mac Mini which is running Catalina and it works flawlessly. I had Catalina OS installed on a four-year-old Seagate 5400rpm hard-drive and that old drive was as slow as molasses. It wasn't so bad with Mojave but with Catalina, I kept getting beachballs on any operation that required disk reads and I did everything I could think of to speed it up but nothing worked. The Seagate showed no errors or anything, but it was just too slow at transferring data with Catalina. Using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on that old hard-drive, the needle barely moved (around 50MB/s) on reads and writes. Absolutely horrible.I couldn't wait to install this SSD into the Mac Mini and it only took about half an hour (I also put in a new fan for good measure). I took my time to make sure everything was done right. Now the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test shows about 450MB/s for writes and 510MB/s for reads and no more beachballs. This SSD runs very cool and is quite snappy with anything requiring reads and writes. It's a terrific replacement drive. I had cloned my Seagate drive with Carbon Copy Cloner and then cloned it back to the SSD after I formatted the SSD using Apple Disk Utility's AFPS option. Everything went smooth as silk. Copying took a few hours because my backup drive was also a 5400rpm USB drive with about 500GB to move. I shouldn't have waited as long as I did as I bought the SSD a few weeks ago, but I was too lazy to make the swap. I highly recommend this SSD to put new life in an older Mac Mini. Catalina runs great on it. Only 2% - 4% CPU use on idle.I just purchased a 2018 6-core i7 Mac Mini with 16GB and 1TB SSD, so I'm going to swap my 2012 Mac Mini out and use it for something else. It's still a great little computer after all these years and the SSD gave it new life. I don't know why Apple now sells any IMac with a spinning hard-drive. Those things are too slow.