Western Digital 2TB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s, 2.5"/7mm, Up to 560 MB/s - WDS200T2B0A, Solid State Hard Drive

Replaced a 2013 HP Envy C: HDD with a WD Blue SSD. Result was amazing: start, shutdown, application startup and general operation are very much faster perhaps up to 3X faster. It is truly amazing. BUT, cloning took three frustrating days to sort out and online searches for cloning tips were unhelpful. After much trial and error, this is the easiest, safest, and least costly way to clone a C: HDD to an SSD: 1) Buy a SSD the same size as the HDD to be cloned. (Other sizes are possible but too much trouble to clone.) 2) Get 2 USB 3.0 (2.0 works too) to SATA adapters. One must has a 12v pwr supply for the HDD. (The SSD is powered through USB.) 3) Use a separate PC (I used a laptop) from the clone source. VERY IMPORTANT KEY TO SUCCESS! 4) Load the free SSD vendor cloning SW (Acronis True Image for WD Edition for a Western Digital SSD.) 5) With the separate PC up and running, connect the target (SSD) and source (HDD) using the USB adapters 6) Run DISKMGMT.msc to activate the target SSD. Do not partition it or assign it a drive letter. 7) Backup the source HDD using the Acronis backup tool. (Just in case.) 8) Run the cloning software and follow the cloning instructions to pick the target and source drives and then start cloning. This will take quite a while, be patient. 9) Wait for cloning to complete (an hour or more - go have lunch). 10) Remove the USB adapter cables from separate PC. Under no circumstances restart separate PC with source or target drive attached, it my corrupt all of the drives including the separate PC's C: drive. 11) Physically install the now cloned SSD into the source PC. Your will need a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter. 12) Keep the old source HDD until you are sure the new target SSD and your source PC get along then properly dispose of it. That's it! Depending on drive sizes and separate PC speed this should take no more than 2 to 4 hours with no hassle or frustration and the results are truly amazing.

Michael Steine · 2020-10-09 · via amazon

My 6-year old HP Pavilion laptop with a Core i7 - 7th Gen - was a race horse when I purchased it - it came with a 1TB mechanical drive. Recently it's been slowing down to a crawl, and taking multiple reboots to start up (especially after those monthly Windows updates), and just plain old bogging down and freezing when I've been making it think too much or gobble too many web pages at one time -- despite all my best efforts to keep it defrag'ed and CCclean'ed, etc - but it's probably my fault because I eventually filled the hard drive to 87% capacity with my "student study notes" WORD document files and .pdf's and video files (not apps or programs). I needed more capacity and more speed. That's why I purchased this WG Blue 2TB SSD. My friend who is a computer tech, told me THIS particular model WD Blue SA510 WDS200T2B0A SSD drive is the one he recommends. WD customers get free use of Acronis True Image for cloning. I'm a tech level "barely novice", but I'm able to follow instructions and to take educated guesses when I reach a fork in the road with no instructions about which way to go. WD's website has a page "Steps to Clone an Operating System Drive with Acronis True Image for Western Digital". I printed it out and studied it, and I watched a few YouTube videos showing me how to open the laptop and replace the hard drive -- one of the videos showed how to use Acronis for WD -- and then I started following the steps of the process. The Acronis True Image cloning instructions are not nearly as complete as I would have liked -- maybe not updated, and some of the "next step/next screen view" that actually happened, were not as the instruction said would happen -- so I had to make some guesses during the 11-page, step-by-step process -- I wouldn't rate those cloning INSTRUCTIONS as 5 stars, maybe only 3 at best -- but I got lucky, because I finally ended up at the actual cloning process -- and from there, it only took 2-1/2 hours to complete the cloning, and then when I restarted (JAN 20, 2024), my laptop is lightning fast again and has been running great, and I'm VERY HAPPY. Now I'll just have to wait and see how reliable the new drive is. I'll update this review if anything changes; so if it's not updated, then all is well.

R Mac · 2024-01-21 · via amazon

I used this drive to upgrade storage on my wife's small form factor PC. The drive itself is fine, not exactly top of the line performance but it's more than fast enough and large enough for everyday computing use. My only gripe is the included western digital cloning and utility software. The cloning software only works if you have the new drive installed as an internal drive. If you try to clone an old hard drive with this new drive attached via USB, the cloning software doesn't recognize the new drive as a Western Digital drive and it will refuse to work. This is a huge limitation that makes the included software completely USELESS for most people. Most people will want to clone the drive before removing the old drive out, since there's no easy way to even run the cloning software from a bare empty WD drive and some computers don't have any way to attach more than one internal drive. So that's a huge fail on Western Digital's part. I own the full version of Acronis so I just used that to clone the old drive. After cloning, this new drive swapped in for the old one without any problems and it has worked great ever since. So yes this is a nice SSD but if you're using it to replace an existing drive you will probably want to find a different cloning solution since Western Digital's software doesn't work if you need to use a USB adapter to attach the new drive while cloning.

Flensr · 2019-10-12 · via amazon

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