SanDisk Ultra 3D NAND 500GB Internal SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s, 2.5 Inch /7 mm, Up to 560 MB/s - SDSSDH3-500G-G25

Excellent upgrade and amazing performance.I wanted to upgrade my laptop's 720GB HDD with SSD. I had two choices upfront; one being Samsung EVO and the other SanDisk. Somehow when it comes to USB flash drives or high performance SD/microSD cards I always tend to buy SanDisk products which is a bit expensive than others in the similar product range. I had no complaints about a single product so far. That's the reason I chose SanDisk over Samsung as my experience with Samsung products have been always horrible.I replaced this drive with my 6years old 5200rpm HDD. Before replacing I noted the boot-up time which wasn't that bad as my machine is quad core. My Windows 10 Enterprise loads quick but after logging in it still takes time to initialize the tray icons and load other start up services which accounted for 52secs. After installing this SSD, it completes the same process in hardly 25secs. Keep in mind that I am a Software Engineer having 2 to 3 heavy services running on logging in.My all Microsoft Office documents started opening in blink of an eye. My IDE/compilers like VS Studio 2015 & 2017 started loading my software projects in few seconds. Compiling a software had a drastic improvement. Overall I didn't expect such better performance over my older drive.I am surprised and completely happy with my purchase. Though I would like to suggest others to use this SSD as a primary drive where you install OS on than simply using it as a storage drive until money isn't a constraint.I cloned my old HDD with this SDD using Sabrent's SATA docking/cloning dual bay device. This was my first time to clone my HDD to SSD and had my fingers crossed. I successfully cloned the drives and hooked up this SSD to my laptop. All softwares are working fine in the new drive with top notch performance. It didn't ask for re-registration of any licensed software which I had a doubt before the swap. But FYI, my Windows 10 did detect this swap change and during the first startup displayed an error message informing it detected a change and is fixing it. After this everything is working as expected.Hope this review is helpful.

Firstly, I want to go ahead and state the following:While everyone moves to M.2 and PCI-E based NVME storage, I still recommend SATA based SSDs as the best bang for your buck. If you look at synthetic or simulated test scores from software like crystal disk mark, you may be easily swayed to pay the premium for NVME, however, real world usages still shows that SATA SSDs are still very close in terms of game / application loading speeds. Yes, the NVME is faster, there is no denying it, but at this juncture if you are looking to keep costs low, you can feel confident in still buying a standard SSD.With that out of the way, I particularly want to state that I have had really good luck with Sandisk drives, with zero failures to date. This 2TB drive is still fresh so I can't comment on its longevity, but it booted fine and is not showing signs of early failure. To be perfectly honest, you can likely even go for the lower tier variant and not notice any real world difference in performance, but I chose the extreme because the price difference is small and when I build for someone else I tend toward slightly more premium options.

I ordered a mounting kit for this that came with cables. It turns out all I needed was a cable as my computer had a bay that it slid right into and required no extra mounting hardware. But you do need a SATA cable and power cable. You can buy a kit like I did that has the mounting hardware and cables pretty cheaply.Installation as an additional drive was simple. I just screwed it into the mounting bay and slid it back into my computer, plugged a small power cable into the drive and an available power port, and plugged the SATA cable into a socket on my motherboard and the the drive. Using the drive manager in Windows, I saw the drive, partitioned and formatted it, and now have an additional drive. I bought this one because one specific game I play takes a very long time to load and is a game that I load and reload frequently to switch characters. This speeds it up a lot.If you want to use it to replace your system drive, then you'll want to get a utility that allows you to make a copy of your master drive onto this one. There are utilities from Acronis and other manufacturers. What you would do is plug in the drive into your computer, boot up the utility from a flash drive or CD-ROM you burn, use the utility to mirror your system drive onto this SSD, then turn off your computer, unplug the drives, and plug this SSD back into the port your had your system drive on. Then when you boot up, you'd be booting up from this SSD and you'll see a HUGE gain in performance if you're coming from a physical hard drive.

Worked great in my Levana laptop, good value

This drive supports the ext4 file system where most nVME drives do not.From Wikipedia:The ext4 filesystem can support volumes with sizes in theory up to 64 zebibyte (ZiB) and single files with sizes up to 16 tebibytes (TiB) with the standard 4 KiB block size, and volumes with sizes up to 1 yobibyte (YiB) with 64 KiB clusters, though a limitation in the extent format makes 1 exbibyte (EiB) the practical limit.[13] The maximum file, directory, and filesystem size limits grow at least proportionately with the filesystem block size up to the maximum 64 KiB block size available on ARM and PowerPC/Power ISA CPUs.

I was looking for a SSD for the first time (still wish it were cheaper), but saw that at the time of purchase this was $10 less than the brother from the different named mother (the drives are the same). As a first time user of a SSD I found the upgrade easy. The performance difference is very notable compared to the SHD I was using which itself was a performance jump compared to HDDs. And with this upgrade I now can install some games I had been waiting to play for lack of disk space. Games load very quickly now, and level changes are much less painful. Performance, space and a new experience have me smiling.