SamsungMZ-7KE256BW 850 PRO 256 GB 2.5 inch SATA III Solid State Drive - Black

Windows 10 Desktop. i5 5th Gen Intel, 16gb RAM. PC Self build MSI motherboard.My C: drive was a Western Digital Raptor, quite fast for a hard disk but very very noisy and continually needed defragging.I decided on the EVO as the performance difference to the PRO was not that important for me, I needed to work with a quiet machine.Performance was 1m:30s to boot to desktop before installation, 30 seconds with the SSD installed. I do have some cache on other hard disks a few seconds could be saved without this I guess.Please note that the SSD comes with no screws, no SSD holder and no USB cloning cable. I had a Crucial SSD cable and the tiny screws came with my PC case. These little screws a difficult to source, I would hope they come with an SSD holder if you need to order one, so be aware!INSTALLATION:- Don't use the CD which comes in the SSD box, it is most likely out of date and may not support Windows 10, my CD was V4.5 and V4.9 is the most recent. You could end up in all sorts of trouble using the CD.- Sign-in to your computer with Administrator rights.- If you have migrated to Windows 10 you may consider removing Windows.old on the C: drive- Tidy up the old disk by removing unwanted programs and temp files, as a precaution I also prevented the C: drive being optimised at this time.- Download Samsung Data Migration Software from the Samsung website, being careful not to download from a download site.This software clones your hard disk to the SSD.- Download Samsung Magician Software for PC; or MAC of course,Magician software should reside on your computer it is used to optimise the computer and checks/downloads the firmware version.- Insert the SSD into the USB cable device.- Run the Samsung Data Migration Software to clone the hard disk by following the instructions.- Switch off your computer and remove the power cable.- You can next remove the old hard disk and install the SSD, don't touch the contacts!- Turn on your computer, install and run the Magician software and optimise to your requirements and check for firmware updates.Then run a performance check, mine is Read 535 / Write 508 Mbit/sIf you have a laptop with no encryption program such as BitLocker then encrypt the SSD.- Sign back into your computer with Standard rights, Administrator privilege is a high security risk.- Enjoy the new speed and quietness.Tip! There are programs which TRIM SSD cards, according to Samsung TRIM is automatically built into Windows 8 and above so don't do this.Hyper-V. if you are running Hyper-V then it may not start, ignore any messages about BIOS and do this:- open the Windows Command prompt as Adminitrator- enter this commandbcdedit /set {current} hypervisorlaunchtype auto- reboot and it works.

Bought this to replace a Crucial M500 which was hosting a windows 10 VM on my imac. The Crucial disk wasn't giving any problems but I wanted the extra space and what I thought was extended life. After appearing to work ok for a few days it started 'disappearing' from Fusion and corrupted the W10 install. Fortunately I had it backed up to the Crucial disk. Spent the next few months trying various swap out options to identify whether the problem was with the cabling, the imac port or the enclosure but have finally come to the conclusion that its the disk so I now have to go through the lengthy process of returning the disk to Samsung, waiting for them to return it to me saying there is nothing wrong with it, and repeating the process until they finally relent. I bought this disk in a Black Friday sale and after reading similar reports I suspect that Samsung are supplying returned faulty units for these events - just my suspicion. In the meantime I have got a Crucial MX500 replacement which so far works flawlessly.

Simply AWESOME boost in overall performance on my WIndows 7 Desktop , which I use for very technical software engineering work , whilst multi tasking with music or video in the background.My PC is a tad old, but with a good spec- and until now, had been using 6 hard drives(physical) with a Velociraptor 150 GB HLFS driv as my boot drive.Spec of the original PC----------------------------------- CPU: Intel I7 920-- RAM: 12GB Corsair-- Hard drives: 6. Comprising of Western Digitial and Seagate; iincluding 3 AV drives for my video and audio collection-- Graphics : NVIdia 610-- O/S: Windows 7I then finally got to a point in life where SSD and its associated costs became a viable proposition..Since Installing this 750 Evo... my PC has gone to cloud 9!With 12 GB of RAM to go with it, and with the Samsung Magician installed... everything seems to be cached and what used to take 2 seconds, now (for most part)... take 0.5 seconds ; or a Windows 7 boot up (cold) that used to take up to 75 seconds, now happens in less than 10!!All my Windows Media player music /MP3s too are readily available, when I switch between playlists(I have over 25,000 tracks!).All in all, as a software engineer and video/music lover, I'm in cloud 9 - based on my PC's Performance gain!Thanks Samsung, for your as-always-impressive products!Very happy customer here! :)

The 850 PRO SSDs are agreat combination of performance versus price, and have a better warranty than the lower grade drives, which gives more confidence in their longevity if Samsung are prepared to offer a 10 year lifespan. I've lost 3 Sandisk drives either just within or just without their warranty period, and constant re-installing of your OS and apps gets old pretty fast. My data is still held separately on a 2TB HDD, but the speed of these drives will give any PC a boost if it previously ran on a HDD. Booting up in 11 seconds, and getting into Outlook almost instantly is quite impressive when you first experience it, but in the end, you only notice the speed you have when you have to slum it and use a machine with an old-skool spinning drive!BTW- these drives are only 7mm deep instead of the older 2.5"standard of 11mm, so if you're installing one in a caddy of any sort, bear in mind that you might need a little packing to stop it rattling.

Having replaced two HDs in laptops with 240GB Sandisk SSD Plus upgrades (https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-PLUS-Sata-inch-Internal/dp/B01F9G43WU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508529470&sr=8-1&keywords=sandisk+ssd), I was very impressed with the all-round increase in performance. The Windows Experience Index tops out on the Sandisk SSDs. So this Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB was a rather expensive speculative attempt to upgrade even more.I am glad that I tried the experiment. This Samsung SSD and the superb utility Samsung Magician is worth the extra cost, no doubt in my mind. I can see a further increase in boot speed and general operational speed in my Core i5 Toshiba Satellite C855D - and the Samsung Magician utility makes the tuning process to achieve maximum performance quite easy. I did not use the data transfer utility side of the Magician software, I like to install from scratch. But I have no doubt that it would work, the whole software/driver support is excellent, it reeks of professionalism. Overall it is vastly superior to the Sandisk util. The whole package is worth every penny of the extra money.