Intel - 520 Series 120GB Internal Serial ATA Solid State Drive for Laptops

I purchased this SSD as a replacement for a failed HDD. The price and size had kept me away from purchasing any SSD as I had no real reason to buy one up until that point. It's still early in this drive's life cycle at only 2 months to find any fault that have yet to crop up, but the increase in both application speed and write/read rates is amazing. As I'm a game designer, this is a great benefit to me; though the drive space is lacking. For the price and size, this is a moderately made SSD compared to other high capacity drives and although at the higher end of the price per space spectrum, this 120GB has enough space and is both cheap and reliable enough to be more than adequate for most users. Those however looking for more space to couple the SSD's performance speed may want to look towards the higher capacity right away. My only problem with this drive at the moment is the overall lack of space to which I can use. Having formatted and installed my OS onto the drive, I was left with roughly 80GB of space. To me, this isn't enough space for storing large amount of data. Those looking to purchase this drive should do so with the intent of either having a multlpe drive configuration or one of minimalistic needs.

My IT guy recommended that I order this SSD at the same time that I ordered my new Dell workstations. I had the PCs and the SSDs delivered directly to his office, so I can't comment on ease of installation. At the same time, I orderred an additional SSD for my 3 year-old Mac Mini. The New PCs are lightning-fast and silent, but they ARE new, so I have no authentic frame of reference. I can state with total confidence, though, that the SSD made a new machine out of my Mini, which had gotten very sluggish and prone to freezing. It took up to 90 seconds to boot up and connect to the Internet.. WIth the SSD, every action is immediate. I have read that the long-term track records of SSDs is not really known yet, but I can testify that the initial impression is amazing.

Love the speed of this hard drive and the fact that its silent uses very little power. If you don't already have AHCI enabled on your SATA ports in your BIOS, though, and are running them in IDE mode instead you may find that changing it to AHCI mode could mess up your Windows DRM key and other things that care about your hardware "fingerprint". There are also changes that need to be made to the Windows registry before enabling AHCI mode if not done prior to OS install. I gave an Ease of Use rating of 4 stars, still, because it will work out of the box in IDE mode. Enabling AHCI mode may not be required for everyone, even though it does open up the advanced SATA capabilities which can result in performance improvements etc.

I recently upgraded from a 500GB traditional SATA drive to this Intel 520 Series (120GB) Solid State Hard Drive. I still use the old Hard Drive as a secondary drive, but this Solid State has performed perfectly. The speeds are incredible, it boots up my Asus i7 laptop in under 10 seconds and launches any programs housed on the drive rapidly. The setup was very simple and all of the necessary parts were included. It took a few minutes to take apart the laptop, connect the hard drive and boot it all back up. Solid State Drives are still a bit more expensive then your traditional hard drives but for the speed/performance you get out of it, it's worth it.

Ok so it didn't really change my life, but it completely changed my computer. I bought 2.. one as a boot drive, the other I install all my .exe's on. I also have my original 1TB harddrive that I use to store music, documents, pictures, etc... Basically anything that doesnt need to take up valuable space on the SSB. But honestly, my computer is as a whole 10 times faster and MUCH more pleasant to use. Everything is instant... I HIGHLY recommend upgrading your PC with these.

This thing breathed new life into my aging Macbook pro and was totally compatible which was a big concern I had. Boot time is ridiculously fast now and I get photoshop running in no time. However it was pricey considering the amount of actual space you get. I've since found some pretty good deals online. Still I think it deserves the score I gave it. It certainly exceeded my expectations.

I bought the 120 and 180 GB models for my Toshiba x775 3dv80 laptop. Since my laptop already had two internal ports, I installed the 120 in the spare slot then used the software to migrate/clone the OS. I had copied my game drive onto an external drive before starting. Once the OS was installed, I just swapped the primary for the new SSD and installed the 180 as my secondary, and copied the games I wanted from the external drive. Make sure AHCI is enabled beforehand or else you may need to do a fresh install of the OS. You'll need to download INTEL SSD Toolbox for optimization, the clone software needs to be downloaded too. Be sure to minimize page files, turn off indexing, and absolutely DO NOT DEFRAG. If you follow all these steps these drives will do wonders and should last. Tom's hardware has a great review of the 520 series. Laptop boots in about 20 secs, CRYSIS 1-3, SKYRIM w/ all HD packs, Deadspace 3, Arkham City, and some assorted race games all load more quickly and improved render times. Seemed to also improve battery time slightly for web browsing and Office work. Games will still use up the battery because cooling fans and gpu load. Another thing that can help these last, is try not to constantly write then erase large GB files such as games in the 4-15 GB range or large movie files. From what I've read it's the large writing that can cause the flash fatique. Once you've installed the large files you want, small writes and routine Toolbox maintenance should be fine for about as long as a normal HD. I've had these for a month and left 35GB on the OS, and 15-20GB on the Game drive. Not so much as 1% lost yet.

I put this in a gaming rig I just build. My new motherboard has Speed Boot built in and the average boot on a platter hard drive was right around 17 seconds which is amazingly fast. I switched to the solid state and I went to a 4 second cold boot!! Turning my PC on is like it was never even off. I would never use anything other than solid state for a boot drive ever again. The only cons I have is I had to pay money for it. There is nothing I can say bad about this drive.