Western Digital 1TB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s, M.2 2280, Up to 560 MB/s - WDS100T2B0B

If you haven't done much research on this form factor of drive and how they work in a computer, you should read this whole review. If you know what you want already, this is a solid performer for the ssd type m. 2 and vastly out performs sata cable drives with a good price point to boot. Western digital is an old school drive maker, and this is a good example of solid hardware.If installing one of these on a desktop is new to you...If this is a new installation in a motherboard or you're switching to a new hard drive make sure you look at your motherboard specs.There are two kinds of M.2 drives that are common right now. Mid range Motherboards handle them in different ways.This drive is an m.2 ssd sata drive, so when you put it in, it uses a sata lane in order to work. This means that it may disable a sata plug on your motherboard. If your operating system (ie windows or Linux) is installed in the sata port you just shut off by installing this your system will fail to boot and you will have to move the plug on the old drive to get the computer to load or to clone your hard drive to this one. You may have to tell your bios what the new load order is.The other kind of common m. 2 drive is a m. 2 pcie ssd. It uses a pcie lane to work. If you have something plugged into a pcie expansion slot it may turn that slot off. Some folks have network cards or video cards plugged into these slots and it could be an inconvenience. These pcie drives are faster, but honestly I doubt most people will see a big difference and the list item I am posting this review on is perfect for most uses.Look at your motherboard book or do a little research before you install one of these if you are new to them so that you know what the install is going to change in your computer.This is a really great drive, it runs well, and I love how small it is... It lost one star from me in the gaming catagory because it does not come with a heatsink. I don't think it necessarily should have one for this price but I bought a cool led one because for that application it needs to have a heat spreader.

The SSD itself is great so far. It arrived today and so far it's working perfectly. However, the Acronis cloning software provided by WD is absolute junk. First of all it's a huge download that failed several times when I tried to get it and my connection was perfectly stable so I know it's not on my end. Secondly the software is not easy to use, it wouldn't let me easily resize my OS partition; I had to fight with it for a few minutes to get the settings the way I wanted them. Thirdly the software is glitchy - it does this thing where it reboots the computer and then works on copying the partitions without running the OS - while it was cloning my old drive it just went to a black screen with only the mouse/spinner showing. If not for my HDD light I wouldn't know anything was happening at all. After over 2 hours of waiting for this thing to finish (as I read online people waited a long time and eventually it finished and rebooted the computer normally) I decided that it wasn't going to work. I was cloning an existing, smaller, SSD and I knew that it shouldn't be taking this long. So I tried to reboot my PC to get out of this black screen and guess what - it boots right back into the black screen again. The only way to break out of it was to remove the new drive, restart, boot normally, shutdown, reinstall the new drive again. Do yourself a huge favor and use Macrium Reflect instead - it's free and works much much better. It's not that obvious how to resize partitions with Marcium (if you need to do that, which I did as I was going from smaller drive to larger one), so go watch a youtube video about it or poke around a while until you find it. Macrium was done cloning in about 20 minutes and no reboot or crazy black screen required. So far the cloned drive is working perfectly, no issues at all after playing a huge game for hours.

I bought the 2950x, Corsair 760T chassis, Asus Zenith Extreme, Corsair HX1000I PSU, Thermaltake Floe Riing 360, Corsair LPX 32GB (2x16GB) 3200MHz C16 DDR4 DRAM Memory Kit, Black (CMK32GX4M2B3200C16), SamSung EVO 970 512G NVMe, WD 1TB Blue NVMe, Toshiba HD 6TB x3 from Amazon. The CPU arrived but the chip was loose inside the box. I could not install Windows 10 but was able to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. When I ran Chrome or Firefox under , the CPU kept hanging up. I changed to Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 DRAM 2133MHz (PC4 17000) C13 Memory Kit - Black, thinking may be memmory compabibil;ity from what I read on Youtube, web. But the problem still occured, can not install windows, kept on hanging when runing Chrome, FireFox under Ubuntu. Changed to G.SKILL Flare X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) AMD X370 Memory Model F4-3200C14D-16GFX. Same problem occrued. I changed the mem clock to from 1600-3200 for 3200 MHZ and 1600-2133 MHZ for 2133 MHZ and 1600-3200 for G.Skill. Same problem. Can not install Windows 10. hung when ran Chrome under Ubuntu. Hung when ran Geekbench when it run under multi core, single core is ok. I ran mem test and it was ok. Thinking the CPU was damage during ship, I ask for replacement and got one. When i installed in the system ansd ran with G.Skill, It was able to boot windows 10, Ubuntu and no problem.I had to upgrade the BIOS to 1402 for the Asus Zenith to boot with 2950x.Now it works very smoothly. It run fast!!!!,Very happy with the unit.