SAMSUNG 860 PRO SSD 256GB - 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal Solid State Drive with MLC V-NAND Technology (MZ-76P256BW)

Very quick and easy upgrade for pretty much any laptop (or desktop for that matter). Assuming you have at least the minimum amount of memory installed, this is the place to spend your upgrade dollars. This solid state "hard drive" is super easy to install (although I am an IT guy) and it really wakes Windows up. Boot time, or time for Windows to be usable, was significantly reduced. Overall speed is also improved quite a bit.Now...I have software and a "cradle" on a desktop computer that allowed me to make an image of my existing laptop hard drive, and then I just laid that image down on the new SSD and viola, boot and go. No need to backup and restore data, no need to reinstall Windows, just go. You might have to resize the partition to get all the space on the new SSD, but it's super easy in Windows. You can most likely find a local computer store that will take care of that image process for not very much money.For any model laptop you have, you can always just Google "hard drive replacement" or "hard drive install" and you'll get some step-by-step instructions (very easy to do in any laptop I've ever worked on).Do not let an SSD fill up, your system will just crash with no error. It will reboot, but as the system creates working files, it will crash again. Nothing wrong with the drive, just needs some room.I've had SSD's in my work laptop for more than a year with no failures. I think durability is now good, to very good on most SSD drives. This quality drive, at this price...no brainer.

My Macbook Pro was taking 10 minutes to boot up and thereafter would take at least 5 minutes to open apps, such as iTunes, Word, Excel, Spotify, etc. Typing outgoing emails in Outlook would begin the lagging cursor after more than 10 emails were in a chain. I was about to drop nearly $2,000 on a new Macbook Pro, when someone suggested that I upgrade my hard-drive to a SSD drive. I received it in two days (ordered on a Friday night and came on Sunday afternoon). I used Apple's Disk Utility App to erase/format the new Samsung SSD and SuperDuper! app (I had to download it) to clone my old hard-drive using Sabrent 2.5"SATA Hard Drive/SSD to USB 3.0 Adapter (EC-SSHD). After about 5.5 hours of letting SuperDuper clone the new SSD, it was ready to install. Took the screws out the bottom of the laptop, removed the old hard-drive carefully, and used a pair of vice scripts needle nose pliars to remove the side posts off the old hard-drive. Be very careful doing this (supposed to use a very tiny star head, but unless its steel, it's not going to stand up to these screws - this was the hardest part). Put the mounting posts in and hooked up the Samsung SSD (dont tear the thin tape cable), and screwed the 4 screws to secure the hard-drive. Next, replace the bottom of the laptop and turned on. MY MACBOOK BOOTED UP IN LESS THAN 15 SECONDS. APPS TAKE LESS THAN 3 seconds to open now. INCREDIBLE. And I saved nearly a couple thousand dollars for now by not buying a brand new macbook. Very pleased. I just hope that it's a reliable piece of hardware, but it has a 5-year warranty. Definitely recommend!

Purchase with confidence.

I'm very pleased with this Samsung 860 Pro 1TB SATA SSD from Samsung. I got a pair it to upgrade a client's tower from 3.5in hard drives and breathe new life into the system's performance. I also took the opportunity to run a little performance testing. It did well.I used crystaldiskmark to benchmark drive performance. It tests with and without command queuing. Since all current operating systems I use (Windows 7 and later, Linux and Mac) all enable command queuing by default I'll focus on those results.The drive does great with sequential reads/writes. I got reads of about 558MB/s and writes of about 512MB/s. Most SSD drives do fairly well on sequential read/write operations. With this drive the difference is only about 10% for queued vs unqueued.This 860 PRO drive did better than many other drives with random reads at about 300MB/s and writes at about 207MB/s. Unqueued reads were about 36MB/S (almost 1/10th the queued rate!) and writes were about 65MB/s (about 1/3 the queued rate). Command queuing makes a big difference with random access and makes this drive stand out for this use.The 2.5in SATA form factor works well with the Dell 2.5in to 3.5in adapters that fit into the existing drive caddies making 3.5in drive replacement a breeze.An important factor for me and my clients is reliability. SSD's have come a long way since they were introduced some years ago. The Samsung Pro series has better reliability and higher write specs than their EVO models. They also have slightly larger sizes in powers of 2 rather rounded down to the nearest decimal value.In conclusion, this Samsung 860 SSD is one of the faster ones I've used, especially on random reads/writes with queuing enabled. This drive was perfect to upgrade my client's system. The old mechanical drive is now retired and their previously fairly fast tower just flies now! With this sort of result I love these drives for upgrades. Definitely 5 stars.