Intel - Cherryville 520 180 GB 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive - 1 Pack

Currently the best sandforce SSD on the market. Love this drive. My laptop has 2 drive bays, so I use this ssd to dual boot Windows 7/Windows 8 and my 750GB Seagate as data storage. This review should give a clear picture of that: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/intel-ssd-520-review-cherryville-brings-reliability-to-sandforce Pros: 1) Intel developed drive firmware and software (The SSD toolbox and migration software both work well) 2) Ease if install - all needed equipment (include SATA cable and mount for desktop installs) are included 3) Pure speed 4) 5 year warranty Cons: 1) premium price 2) The Best Buy spec on the site also needs to be corrected - this product actually carries a 5 year limited replacement warranty (the limit being if the drive has reached the end of what Intel considers its "useful life", then the warranty is void. Useful life is determined by indicators on the drive showing the amount of read/write cycles performed). If using this drive as an OS drive: Make sure you turn off indexing as well as enable write caching. Also, if windows 7, turn off the Superfetch service.

On my mid-2011 Apple MacBook Pro (MBP), I opted for this 180GB SSD. I do web design and development, web programming, and Windows programming. This drive covers my basic apps and VMs, with 30GB to spare. Without the sound recording studio I'd have 80GB left... What made me choose this drive is the SandForce 520 chipset. It has built-in garbage collection that renders the need for TRIM drivers needless. The OS shouldn't have to do drive maintenance anyway, that should be the drive's job, which means fewer drivers for the OS to have running in memory... Also, computer owners running a SSD without its own garbage collection or without TRIM enabled is begging for trouble: A SSD's effective lifespan would plummet, since these devices can only be written to a certain number of times before they "wear out", and garbage collection organizes and optimizes where and how the drives are written to. Until SandForce, only TRIM was the solution, and not available for all customers who use the drive, depending on their OS... So that's the two scoops. When installing this drive, feel content that you don't need to install any unsupported hacks in any OS that lacks or prohibits TRIM support. And that the OS shouldn't have to deal with disk maintenance at this level to begin with... Oh, the drive is massively fast - naturally, for it is a SSD. Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8) boots in 10 seconds, and apps load up almost instantly. Even my Windows VM starts up faster than a native, modern Windows machine. And even better, Intel's five YEAR warranty is highly competitive. SSDs are expensive, so Intel putting up a solid warranty upfront only adds to a greater sense of security.

Got a great deal on this drive. Regular price was $199, but was able to snag the product for $159. The drive is very light, and was fairly easy to install. Design is sturdy, but the Aluminum "looks cheap" and discolored #not an issue since the only time I will look at the drive is when I install#. Performance on thsi drive is great. Not only does my MacBook Pro 13" 2.8Ghz with 8GB RAM boot up in less than 18 seconds, but all aplications that were previously open before restart re-open instantaneously. I wish the larger configurations of this drive mainainted the same dollar to GB price ratio. 180GB's is more than enough for the system plus the applications, but due to my iTunes and iPhoto collection, i'm going to have to replace my optical drive with an HDD to contain my Home folder's contents. I had the Seagate Momentus XT 750GB before this drive, and even though Seagate claims that their drive is comprable to an SSD I would have to disagree. Performance difference even with these two drives is like night and day #even with the difference I saw from my factory installed 5400RPM drive to Seagate's Hybrid#. I can only imagine how big of a speed difference i would have noticed upgrading from that drive to this SSD. If you can afford to shell out the extra bucks go for the larger drive and avoid the hassle of installing two drives. If you're more price-conscious and are willing to sacrifice "some" performance / avoid complicated configurations, go for the Momentus XT #great investment for average+ user#. Just dish out the extra $50 and upgrade your ram to 8GBs #2x4GB#. P.S. Not constantly hearing my fan going off / having my MBP remain quiet is wonderful :)

Pro's: -Very fast, shortened boot time and it takes around 9 seconds to get to desktop (sata 3gb/s) -256-bit encryption built in -5 year warranty -Includes everything you need, software brackets, and cables to install in desktop or laptop. I am using this in my laptop on an old sata 3gb/s connection and i can still manage around 180MB/s read speeds. Imported my entire library of around 5,000 songs into itunes in under a minute. Con's: -Drive gets very hot! I burned myself while doing the initial copy of data -This is probably my own OS corruption, but HDD light randomly just turns on, computer locks up, and i have to to a hard reset.

I bought this to migrate my regular 7200 HDD and it works amazingly fast now. I assumed that i would new to pay extra for a conversion kit but it came with it and INTEL offers a free migration software for your easy transfer. Those that are familiar with imaging would use this. It is Acronis, not fully featured but still awesome software. This is a Best buy for the money.

After going through several reviews about this item, I decided to take my chances. Set up and installation was a breeze, performance gains were noticeable, ultra quiet, less strain on the processor = less heat! I would highly recommend this to anyone looking for a reliable HDD upgrade.

I bought this drive to serve as my operating system drive for my office PC, an HP i7 desktop machine that came with a spinning 2gb drive I really didn't want to use. I've been using SSDs for my OS and programs but a hard drive setup for my data for several years now. The Intel drive was a natural pick as my other PCs all have Intel SSDs and they are trouble free. SSD costs more than a HD, but the speed is great when your time is billable. This time I also installed two HP 240 gb SSDs from Best Buy for the RAID for my client files. All I can say is this thing is quick and quiet!

These drives are amazingly fast. I bought the 320 series and loved them, then I read reviews about the 520 and decided to plop down some coin on these bad boys. This review isn't necisarriily for a Best Buy review as you can find these drives anywhere. I just happened to purchase them at Best Buy since it was an Impulse Buy. ;) Coming from a technical background here's some jargon. I used these on a p67 chipset and I achieved speeds of 4-500 MB/S, I recently upgraded to the p79 chipset and ran the HD Tune tests again and got over 982 MB/s average transfer over about 10 tests. Compare that to my standard Sata 7200k rpm drives putting out a measly 118.4 MB/s. One should note that both drive array's (solid state, platter) are running RAID 0 on an on board Intel Controller. When I first got the 320 series, Intel had released a driver update that dramatically increased performance on those, almost doubling my speed instantly. If there's one thing about any solid state drive, you need to keep your drivers up to date. Because this is new(ish) technology, every driver update usually equals greater speed increase in some area, whether it's seek time, access time, or read / write. I'm not saying that 3 driver revisions from now your drives will be doing 3x the speed they are now, but it's a lot better than before. Non-technical jargon here. These drives are fast, reliable and well built. They come with adapters so you can place these 2.5 drives (laptop size) into your 3.5 drive bay (regular heavy hard drive) to place in your desktop computer. Most newer cases now come with 1 or 2 SSD specific places, but if you are looking at breathing some new life into some older hardware, these things will totally do it. You will NOT get better performance if your system does not support Sata 3 chip sets, you will be limited to whatever your machine has in it and is capable of. Yes RAID 0 is faster than just plugging it in, however, if you buy one of these to rebuild your laptop or net book you won't be disappointed. Most machines released in the last year or two are Sata 3 now anyway. The main reason I bought these was I had two Macbook Pro 2008 model from when they changed over to the new body style, however because of the NVIDIA Chipset in these MacBooks they do not accept any hard drive over Sata 1 interface. I tried with my 320 series and with the 520 series, although the drives are backwards compatible, because they worked in my Dell Latitude D620 from (2005), the MacBook Pro would not boot with them. I presume these would let a newer style MacBook fly with any of these in them, however it's hard to find a good deal on a 320 series as the 520 are almost cheaper for more space.