Western DigitalWDS500G2B0B WD Blue 3D NAND Internal SSD M.2 SATA, 500 GB - Black

I have a HP Envy X360 15XXXX which came with a 128 M.2 SATA SSD (C:) with the system drive on and a standard 1TB 2.5" SATA drive (D:).I initially configured it so that the bulk of installed app files went to D: drive with only the essential ones going to C: drive. However, two and a half years on and C: was quite full.I decided to go for I purchased the 500GB M.2 version of this drive, along with a Sabrant M.2 SSD 2.5inch SATA III Aluminium enclosure adapter (EC-M25A). I already had a WAV Link dual bay SATA III disk cloner which will also act an external drive bay.I downloaded a free version of AOMEI Backupper for copying. For managing the disk, I used two built in utilities - Windows Powershell - needed to remove partitions. Windows Disk Management (Found under computer management in Control Panel). This is used firstly to mount the new disk and give it a drive letter. I suspect some who reported the disk DOA failed to do this. Also for managing the partition sizes.I proceeded as follows:1. Having created recovery disks, the recovery partition was obsolete as it is a one-time deal creating the media. I used HP recovery manager to delete the partition - except it doesn't, it just deletes the data.2. I used Powershell to delete the partition and there are instructions here if you don't know how to do it https://www.windowscentral.com/how-delete-drive-partition-windows-103. I inserted the new drive into the Sabrant adaptor, placed it in a bay of the WAV Link SATA bays and connected it to the USB 3 port. (There us a USB-C version of the adaptor to connect directly to a USB C port if you don't have a dive bay)4. The drive is not detected in Windows until it has been mounted, so I opened Disk Management > Storage and found the unmounted drive. I right clicked and used the wizard to do a basic mount and assign it F: Drive.5. I opened AOMEI Backupper and selected the clone option from the left-hand side. I selected the Disk Clone option from the bottom row.6. On the next screen, I selected Disk 0 - the one with Windows on - as the source disk.7. On the next screen, I selected Disk 2 - the new disk and the destination. Hit OK and it took less than 10 minutes to clone.8. I then opened Disk Management and found the cloned volume at 118GB with around 350 GB of unallocated disk.9. I right clicked on the cloned windows partition and selected 'Extend Volume' and allocated the maximum available space and the new window volume increased to 465GB. I removed it from the adaptor.10. I turned of the Laptop, removed the rear cover and disconnected the battery by removing all the screws and lifting out.11. I then located the current disk, removed the screw and replaced it with the cloned disk.12. I reconnected the battery, replaced the cover and booted up the machine. There was a pause and a message as the BIOS had detected the hardware change. It then rebooted through to windows and everything looked hunky-dory.13. The I ran all major applications and everything was sweet. It was as if I had done nothing, except the was an appreciable increase in speed, especially on boot up. and Windows hello was working great every time - it had started to hang and drop to PIN access.The disk has been sweet since Monday (now Thursday) and I am considering up grading the D: to an SSD as well.So far - very happy. I am of course keeping the Old disk safe . . . . just in case!

This model has a very good price per GB. Usage examples below are true for any SSD, it's just that this model in particular make it easier to buy higher storage capacity.- 250GB/500GB is enough to put your system/standard apps on it, you just need good partitioning and data management.- 1TB allows you to go full SSD, literally replacing your HDD and sometimes external SSD (useful when you have many AAA games or raw movie files)- 2TB is quite extreme, in general you'd buy a 1TB first and then another one for your second M.2 slot if you need more e.g. a dual boot. In my case though, the 1st slot was already filled with a 250GB SSD, which was a bit small to contain a Windows system and multiple versions of various game engines (especially Unreal Engine).Performance is good overall, but I haven't tried different models of SSD with the same OS, so I'm not sure how it compares to others.As with other M.2 SSDs you'll find on the market, note that the M.2 screw is *not* included, and you may need to buy a pack from a specialist store. In my case, I could not find one though, so I recycled a screw I picked somewhere else in my computer, and that had a similar size to an M.2 (replacing that screw with a standard screw that happened to fit). Once you have the screw, you can install it with very little force.

Tested it on user benchmark and it came out almost exactly average for the model (52nd percentile), which speaks to the consistency of build quality. Would obviously be nice to win the numbers lottery and get one with above average performance, but as long as it performs as advertised I've no complaints.If you're on HDD (or a regular SSD) and are hesitant about upgrading to m.2, I'd absolutely recommend going for it. I have a 3.5" and 2.5" HDD for mass storage and had a cheap 2.5 SSD for Windows. The latter was noticeably faster than the former(s), but this blows them all out the water. At a minimum it's four times faster than the HDDs for read and write.This isn't the fastest m.2 you can buy, but it's the best value fast one I've seen in the UK and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it in a pinch.I ummed and arred for a couple of months about buying it wondering if I'd rather spend the money on another component; buying this was absolutely the right call. Every time I load something off the HDDs I notice the lag now, and every time Windows decides to update itself without asking first, I notice how much quicker it is than it used to be. Wouldn't ever want to build a PC without one again.

These M.2 SATA 2280 drives are going out of fashion in favour of the M.2 NVMe. Alas the Raspberry Pi Argon One M.2 case needs SATA - and this one works fine. Carefully seat the drive into the case mounting. I decided to connect the base via USB A to USB A cable, format drive on Pi then use the copy memory stick to disk utility (under accessories). Then modified the boot options, shutdown, take uSD card out, reboot and now have 330MB/s speed. Slightly faster to boot relative to Samsung EVO uSD but everything feels snappier.Transferred video and stills to disk. Will.be using the Pi to render videos - cheap and acceptable performance for what I want.The card works out at 10Gb per £1 in 2021.I bought a SCSI 2 drive at work in 1991 £2000 for 2Gb. Quite an amazing bang for the buck nowadays!It does get hot but so I doubt you can use this for long in a normal Pi4 case - especially given I overclock the CPU and GPU. The M.2 case is neat BUT it does seriously degrade WiFi performance - probably a USB linked SSD might be a better option BUT careful as you may need powered USB - the Pi4 power supply doesn't supply a lot of current to USB bus and what little it does is shared.Bottom line - this M.2 SATA is working well