Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Single Unit Version Internal Solid State Drive MZ-7TE500BW

*THIRD UPDATE*(Edited October 11, 2015) The drive is still chugging along like a champ. The computer I put it in has been junk, but the drive has been fantastic. Still 5 stars. -------------------------------------------- *SECOND UPDATE*(Edited August 3, 2014) Still running like a champ. I can see no reasons at all to not buy this drive. I have no choice to give it 5 stars. -------------------------------------------- *UPDATE*(edited June 16, 2014) Wow. This thing is just unbelievably fast, even after having it for a month and a half. I run several games off of it, and the load times are incredible. An example would be Fallout: New Vegas. With a standard drive, the loading wheel would normally spin for 10-15 seconds. With my OCZ drive, it cut it down to about 5 seconds. With this drive, it is down to maybe 2 seconds. I just can't say enough good things about this drive. If I had the chance to go back in time and either do it again or save my money, I would buy it again in an instant. -------------------------------------------- The drive is excellent. I had an OCZ Agility 3 drive that was only 120gb. It was simply too small. I upgraded to this 500gb drive. It is blazing fast. I had bought RAM for my old laptop that ended up not being compatible for some reason, and I was too late to return that to the store. Since it was sitting around, I decided trying to stick one of the 4gb sticks into the open slot on this laptop. It worked like a charm, and boosted my ram to 12gb. Realistically, I won't use the 12gb any time soon. However, this drive has a "RAPID" feature that allows you to steal some of the ram from your system(2gb in my case) and use it as a cache space for the SSD. Even though this drive is FAST to begin with(I was actually getting 550MB/s read and write), the RAPID feature speeds it up even more. In ATTO Disk Benchmark, I am actually showing read and write speeds of ~1050MB/s. I realize that is impossible, as the maximum theoretical rate for SATA III is 6.0Gb/s, or 750MB/s. I can't say anything about the included migration software, as I used Ghost to clone everything. The only thing I was disappointed to find was that it didn't have the spacer or migration cable, but that is my own fault for ordering the "Single Unit" product and not the "Notebook Kit". I feel it would be unfair to give the product a lower rating due to my mistake. I would just like to warn any prospective buyers that they need to look at the Notebook Kit or Desktop Kit if they are expecting this to come with anything else. The drive is only 7mm thick. If your laptop just lets the drive slide into a slot, this one will likely have some wiggle room. The spacer that comes in the Laptop Kit will take care of that. Since I have only had the drive in here for 1 day, I plan on updating my review about 3 months from now, unless the drive fails before then.

Well, the world ignores us, so I figured I'd ignore it back and write about what Linux users might want to know about this product. The good: First, except for the manuals on it, you can ignore the included CD and the software, it only runs on that other OS. There is no software on the SSD -- but check yours anyway when you get it, because like all manufacturers, Samsung is likely to change that at any time. The setup couldn't be easier. You don't needs the Windows-only "import" software on the CD, any cloning tool will do. I used a copy of live Clonzilla, installed on an ancient USB thumb-drive (512MB and still plenty of space left on it). The Clonezilla site (and so many others) will tell you how you can make a USB thumb-drive or CD that you can use to boot up with and run Clonezilla from it. This is not a Clonezilla how-to, so I won't bother anyone with details, but make sure that when you clone your boot drive/partition (drive sda, partition sda1 for most, check yours), you include the MBR when Clonezilla prompts you for it. Other than that, it's pretty straightforward. You HAVE to use the SSD on the computer, connected to a SATA header internally, because eSata won't work, the Clonezilla mini-linux OS has no support for it. Get your original HDD into an external enclosure, connect via USB, launch Clonezilla, use Disk to Disk or Partition to Partition (no need to make an image for this process), go have a cup of coffee. It will take 10 minutes, or 4 hours, depending on how much data is on your HDD. Bear in mind that the size of your target SSD has to be greater than or equal to your source HDD or partition. If there is an option in Clonezilla to image or clone only the used portion of a partition, I haven't found it (doesn't mean anything, I'm no expert on this tool). Performance is amazing. In my case, I use it on an aging HP-DV8T-1200 that has no AHCI in the BIOS setup. I installed my first SSD as the secondary drive on that system (sdb) first, because that's where I keep a whole bunch of very slow winXP and win7 VMs. I used to watch the grass grow while the XP was booting, now it's just like sitting at a PC with a fresh, brand new, clean install of winXP. Then I replaced the Linux boot drive with another SSD. Ubuntu boots up so quick that you never even see the "blinking dots" screen. The bad: Manufacturers don't like to say this in public, but SSD drives don't have the longevity of HDD drives (I have a couple from the 90s that still work well). So don't toss your HDDs away, and in fact, you could periodically make backup images of your SSD partitions just in case. The Dos: Enjoy it. The Dont's: I know we Linux users running on HDDs formatted as ext4, ext3 etc., never have to worry about fragmentation, but if you run VMs with the VMWare-Player or Workstation too, and some of your guests are Windows, you might be tempted to use Windows-based defragmenters to clean up and eliminate slack. DON'T. EVER. PERIOD. Defragmenters were made for HDDs, for good reasons, and they perform tons of write operations of minute data, and this will definitely shorten the life of your SSD. When, not if, the performance slows down (you could do this right now, no need to wait for it), you may want to consider using fstrim in a cron job. SSDs are great at writing to empty memory cells, but the presence of data from files marked for deletion and not yet deleted (that's how an HDD works), will force the SSD to spend time copying the page to a cache, manipulating it there, erasing the page, and re-writing it from the cache, and that will definitely impact performance. Plenty of good articles on this topic, google them up. That's it. Enjoy!

Do go for it if you're looking to buy SSD having 500GB capacity. Read speed has improved after updating to the latest firmware released on 15th oct. Getting 551MBbs, sigh! Not going to comment on TLC vs MLC. Each one has its own merits and demerits. Definitely a worthy storage option for a typical client load.

This solid state drive is amazing! I replaced it on a 13 inch MacBook Pro (Early 2011) that had the standard 500GB Hard Drive. It is like a completely new laptop, the speed is on another level. Everything opens so fast and works smoothly. It is an AMAZING upgrade for your computer. It also made my MacBook slightly lighter, the SSD barely weighs anything. Definitely worth the price.

Gives your old lethargic pc a new energy. There is almost 5x improvement in pc's performance after installing this. Had some issues in cloning data from my old hard disk to samsung ssd with samsung's bundled cloning software as the data migration software failed to create windows 100/200 mb boot partition on the ssd. Used alternative method to clone my old drive. Also the package did not included sata-usb adapter to connect the ssd to pc for cloning old hard drive. Fortunately I used my internal laptop hard disk enclosure which are readily available in the market for migration old hdd data on ssd.

Update: Aprile 2018!!!!!!! Nulla è cambiato rispetto a quanto descritto nell'aggiornamento di novembre 2017. Incredibile affidabilità. Uno dei migliori acquisti di sempre!!!!! Update: novembre 2017. Desktop acceso 6 giorni su 7 24 su 24h. Solo una leggera perdita di prestazioni dovuta più all'incasinamento del SO e dei programmi che qualcosa che dipenda dall'SSD. Nessun problema, perdita di dati, blocchi. Nulla tutto perfetto. Rendita al 100%. Acquisto tra i migliori in assoluto in relazione a prezzo-qualità-durata Il disco, nella versione semplice senza kit di installazione, arriva con il solo CD con il software Data Migration e Magician, una guida di installazione per immagini che è davvero fuorviante e la garanzia. Insomma dovete avere tutto voi per poterlo installare e configurare. La guida di installazione alla prima figura mostra di inserire il cd ed un monitor con l'immagine del software samsung che si carica. Alla seconda dice di collegare attraverso una interfaccia SATA-USB il disco SSD al computer per far partire la clonazione del vs disco e non mostra che sia possibile farlo in alcun altro modo. In realtà il CD fornito non è avviabile e quindi si deve accendere il computer e dopo che windows è partito potrete lanciare il software samsung. La prima considerazione è che a questo punto andate direttamente sul sito di Samsung e scaricatevi le versioni aggiornate di Data Migration Tools e Magicians ed usate quest e non il cd. La seconda cosa è che se connettete il disco SSD al computer prima di avviarlo ad una porta SATA sarà possibile portare a termine normalmente la clonazione avendo solo cura di selezionare i dischi giusti durante l'operazione. Una volta terminata la clonazione basterà riavviare e nel bios selezionare come disco di avvio quello SSD. Non appena windows si sarà avviato dal nuovo disco lanciate subito Magicians che vi aiuterà a fare le opportune configurazioni a seconda del tipo di uso che vorrete fare del disco samsung. Mi sono molto dilungato a parlarvi della installazione perchè non posso giudicare le prestazioni. Ho un computer datato che non ha un controller SATAIII e gioco forza le prestazioni non possono essere un riferimento valido. Posso assicurarvi che anche così l'incremento prestazionale rispetto ai "vecchi" HD è notevole. Effettivamente la mia installazione di windows 8.1 prima impiegava tra i 25 ed i 35 secondi a finire totalmente il boot e circa 15 prima di essere pronto ai comandi; adesso dopo 4 secondi è pronto a ricevere comandi è il boot è finalizzato entro i 15. Ho letto che ci sono stati molti problemi con il decadimento delle prestazioni dopo un uso minimo di questa famiglia di dischi della samsung. Non ha colpito tutti i dischi prodotto ma molti. E' stato rilasciato da poco però un aggiornamento del firmware che rimette i dischi con problemi alle impostazioni previste. Se sfortunatamente dovreste avere uno di questi dischi non è il semplice aggiornamento del firmware a risolvere il problema ma un apposito software sul sito Samsung che oltre ad installare il firmware modificato fa delle altre operazioni necessarie alla soluzione del problema.

Absolutely love it. The best part was the software that allowed my to clone my existing drive even though it was a different size and be using my new drive only 30 minutes later but with more speed and now more room. Best upgrade anyone can do especially if your a gamer like myself.