Customer Ratings & Reviews

Having a laptop at work that has a solid-state drive (SSD) instead of a spinning disk and also having several early generation SSD drives I use for video production, it is a no brainer to upgrade a hard drive in an older laptop, it increases performance and breathes new life into the device. Part of the reason iPads, tablets and mobile devices start “instantly” or restart quickly is because they do not use spinning disks, they use solid state memory. When you replace a traditional hard drive with one without moving parts you wind up with quick startup times (2 minutes down to 15 seconds) when booting/starting up a Windows 10 device. Just the fact that you are getting much quicker access to read and write file operations on an SSD leads to a large performance gain. The Western Digital - Blue PC SSD 500GB literally was simple to install in my laptop, replacing a Western Digital 750GB 5400rpm Hard drive which was originally installed from the factory in my HP Envy 360 laptop. Now if you are not comfortable with opening a PC (or laptop) and getting into the innards of a device then this is not a self-installable item. Especially if you want to replace the existing hard drive which contains the operating system (Windows). Within the SSD drive packaging there is information on how to download the imaging utility that can “clone” your existing drive to your new SSD. The Acronis software is fairly easy to use, however it does require some additional equipment to clone a device (a hard drive enclosure for your old drive, or SATA to USB adapter). Again if you are a novice, don’t expect to purchase a new SSD and successfully tackle this type of project. As for the drive itself, it comes with no mounting materials, adapters or connectors other than the standard SATA interface connections. The performance of the drive itself when compared to other SSD drives is mediocre, especially PCIe or NVMe M.2 SSDs. However for the price, the Western Digital - Blue PC SSD 500GB drive is a decent value and is a relatively easy way of increasing performance of your PC or laptop. Pros: - Decent price - Substantial performance improvement over traditional spinning hard drives - Acronis software is provided (although has to be downloaded) to help clone or backup your existing drive Cons: - Installation can be tricky - Performance in relation to other SSDs and SSD interfaces is mediocre - Understanding of cloning, backups and Operating System fundamentals is required (recommend professional installation for non-technical users)

I'm sure the drive itself it's just fine and a very high quality, but the cloning software is not proprietary to Western Digital like it is with the Samsung SSD's. As a result, when I tried to clone my existing hard drive to this Western Digital drive it failed and I just couldn't get it to work. So I returned this Western Digital drive and bought a Samsung. The Samsung software worked flawlessly.

gave me better speed an faster load time on programs

Yes, everything runs fast, yes windows boots up in an instant. Stuff installs fast...etc. Big problem is unlike a normal HD, with a SSD, if it dies... its dead. There is no warning. Just instant death and you are left with nothing to recover. At least with normal HDs you can see/tell when they are going and back up stuff early on.

Great hard drive for the price. Pretty self explanatory. Fast response times worth the upgrade from disk hard drive.

My computer is back up and running at the moment. I have no idea yet whether it was a good purchase and it will last.

I'm usually a Samsung fan with SSD's. These WD Blues have been good. I'm not sure they have the performance of Samsung yet....need more testing.

Great ssd works well but a bit slow. I’m replacing my old Mac mini therefore do the job.

Good back up at SSD. It is strange though that the name does not show up as western digital in terms of the manufacturer.

I put this baby in my 8 year old laptop to replace the old hard drive and Old Betsy (my laptop) runs like new! I have had 2 laptops break/stolen so I couldn't really afford another one. I've been chugging along with Betsy for the past 3 years. As a student, it would be beyond painful. It would take 5 minutes to boot up before I could open up Chrome. It would take a while to open up apps and taking tests on my computer was so painful. I bought a cheap Chromebook for school and would only use my laptop for applications and tasks that required Windows. Then, I put this SSD in and man she feels brand new! Boot up is literally 10 seconds. It is an AMAZING upgrade to any computer still running on a hard drive. It is great value for the money. It is by no means the fastest drive on the block but it will get the job done no problem! I was seriously considering getting a new laptop because the slow speeds were affecting my productivity but now I am perfectly happy! All in all, a great SSD that will improve productivity and usability!

Great cheap RAM for an old laptop got me more memory for more multitasking if you need something inexpensive these are for you

Just what could be left If I had to get something else?

3 stars because it was bad out of the box. Was not immediately apparent as I was using Mac os to format the drive and it worked initially but then started failing when I tried to format a second time. Hours wasted, I tried to format with a Windows pc and it failed right away so I should've tried that first. Don't hesitate to suspect a bad drive!

I used this WD SSD to upgrade from an older 7200 RPM WD SATA III mechanical HDD. I could not be any more impressed with how easy this was to install. Cloning my drive was a breeze. I used WD software from my previous drive that I owned. After the installation and cloning the boot time on my Windows 10 machine are just fast and it is a day & night difference. My steam games load in seconds, as well as applications. This WDD is well worth the price of admission. If you have a PC that is sluggish then it may just be the HDD. This is the best performance increase I have on my PC through a single component upgrade. There are many manufacturers in the market place but I chose WD for the reliability and performance from my past experience with the company and the various WD HDD I have owned over the years along with the MY Cloud series HDD they offer. If you need an SSD consider Western Digital they have been in the market for a long time and know how to build solid drives.

There's a good chance if you're looking at this product, you have some knowledge about drive cloning and installation. I'll repeat what some of the previous reviewers have said, namely that there is absolutely nothing in this package but a bare drive. If your thought is to use this to replace your boot drive, you'll need to go to WD.com and download the Acronis True Image software. Other reviewers have stated that this is not the fastest drive on the market, nor does it have the best warranty, so if you're looking for the top of the curve, this is not for you. How I look at it is, this will be a substantial improvement over a mechanical drive, and if you're not a power user, this is something that is seat of the pants noticeable. For an example, I used this to clone a drive on a 5 year old PC. As Windows PC's do over time, it was getting over 2 minute boot time. I also had concerns that the original drive was nearing end of life, so I could revitalize an older pc; have a backup copy of my existing files, and not have to go through the trials & tribulations of transferring files & setting up a new PC. Some people think this is fun, I don't! The transfer went well, and the boot time dropped to well under a minute. My most used applications became noticeably faster - Thunderbird with thousands of emails in various folders; Firefox that I like to open with half a dozen tabs containing my daily most visited sites; functions like sorting files in Explorer are near instantaneous. So for someone bent on having a high end gaming or photo editing machine, maybe spend a few bucks more on a higher spec'd drive. But if you're doing something similar to what I did, upgrading an old horse, catch this on a sale and you have a good deal. Finally, knocks to WD for not providing anything in box but a bare drive. Maybe I'm too old & remember the days when drives came with software & cables. Oh yeah, there is some tiny pamphlet in there, but the print is so microscopic that I literally needed a magnifying glass to read it. Luckily, I had enough knowledge to figure the software would be on the WD site. These SSD drives have been coming down fast in price, keep your eye out for a sale!

It works okay it did not want to read in computer had to manually put into another pc format them put into pc I was working on

Replacement for my previous drive that locked up on me. Seems to be working fine.

It’s nothing special but it definitely will help speed up an old computer. The speeds are pretty average for an SSD.

Needed this to replace the regular hard drive to a solid state for my Dell pc

It is an excellent means to save data from possibly being lost. I use it regularly.