Western Digital WDS500G2B0B WD Blue 3D NAND Internal SSD M.2 SATA, 500 GB - Black

I have a HP Envy X360 15XXXX which came with a 128 M.2 SATA SSD (C:) with the system drive on and a standard 1TB 2.5" SATA drive (D:).I initially configured it so that the bulk of installed app files went to D: drive with only the essential ones going to C: drive. However, two and a half years on and C: was quite full.I decided to go for I purchased the 500GB M.2 version of this drive, along with a Sabrant M.2 SSD 2.5inch SATA III Aluminium enclosure adapter (EC-M25A). I already had a WAV Link dual bay SATA III disk cloner which will also act an external drive bay.I downloaded a free version of AOMEI Backupper for copying. For managing the disk, I used two built in utilities - Windows Powershell - needed to remove partitions. Windows Disk Management (Found under computer management in Control Panel). This is used firstly to mount the new disk and give it a drive letter. I suspect some who reported the disk DOA failed to do this. Also for managing the partition sizes.I proceeded as follows:1. Having created recovery disks, the recovery partition was obsolete as it is a one-time deal creating the media. I used HP recovery manager to delete the partition - except it doesn't, it just deletes the data.2. I used Powershell to delete the partition and there are instructions here if you don't know how to do it https://www.windowscentral.com/how-delete-drive-partition-windows-103. I inserted the new drive into the Sabrant adaptor, placed it in a bay of the WAV Link SATA bays and connected it to the USB 3 port. (There us a USB-C version of the adaptor to connect directly to a USB C port if you don't have a dive bay)4. The drive is not detected in Windows until it has been mounted, so I opened Disk Management > Storage and found the unmounted drive. I right clicked and used the wizard to do a basic mount and assign it F: Drive.5. I opened AOMEI Backupper and selected the clone option from the left-hand side. I selected the Disk Clone option from the bottom row.6. On the next screen, I selected Disk 0 - the one with Windows on - as the source disk.7. On the next screen, I selected Disk 2 - the new disk and the destination. Hit OK and it took less than 10 minutes to clone.8. I then opened Disk Management and found the cloned volume at 118GB with around 350 GB of unallocated disk.9. I right clicked on the cloned windows partition and selected 'Extend Volume' and allocated the maximum available space and the new window volume increased to 465GB. I removed it from the adaptor.10. I turned of the Laptop, removed the rear cover and disconnected the battery by removing all the screws and lifting out.11. I then located the current disk, removed the screw and replaced it with the cloned disk.12. I reconnected the battery, replaced the cover and booted up the machine. There was a pause and a message as the BIOS had detected the hardware change. It then rebooted through to windows and everything looked hunky-dory.13. The I ran all major applications and everything was sweet. It was as if I had done nothing, except the was an appreciable increase in speed, especially on boot up. and Windows hello was working great every time - it had started to hang and drop to PIN access.The disk has been sweet since Monday (now Thursday) and I am considering up grading the D: to an SSD as well.So far - very happy. I am of course keeping the Old disk safe . . . . just in case!

THis drive was purchased to use in a FIDECO enclosure which I have reviewed separately. It will be used with a Google Pixel Book as external storage.When I had assembled the drive into the enclosure I plugged it into my desktop PC which is running Windows 10 Pro latest version. The drive was recognised, so I set the partition as active and told it to format the drive. This failed as incomplete format. I tried 3 times without success. I thought the drive might have been faulty, so plugged it into the Pixelbook , and it was recognised, and formatted, but in FAT32 which I did not want. Windows would still not recognize the drive !!I then installed on the PC , AOMEI Partition Manager. This worked. So I deleted the the FAT32 partition and replaced it with a NTFS one. It now works at last. I think it might have worked if it was installed on the motherboard, but I had problems as an external drive.Moved some 80,000 + JPEG and RAW files onto it. it took 30 minutes to move 380 mb of files , which is not to bad. It did get a bit warm though.The Crystal Mark scores are Random Read 348.3 and Write 449.6 quite respectable speeds for an external drive.The scores would have been faster if it was mounted internally . A USB C thumb drive , a Philips 132 gb gave a score of 101.1 and 63.22.So it was a fairly cost effective way of using one of these M.2 SATA drives as a small form factor external drive.It works very well with the Pixel Book. And with any other computer with a USB C port.

These M.2 SATA 2280 drives are going out of fashion in favour of the M.2 NVMe. Alas the Raspberry Pi Argon One M.2 case needs SATA - and this one works fine. Carefully seat the drive into the case mounting. I decided to connect the base via USB A to USB A cable, format drive on Pi then use the copy memory stick to disk utility (under accessories). Then modified the boot options, shutdown, take uSD card out, reboot and now have 330MB/s speed. Slightly faster to boot relative to Samsung EVO uSD but everything feels snappier.Transferred video and stills to disk. Will.be using the Pi to render videos - cheap and acceptable performance for what I want.The card works out at 10Gb per £1 in 2021.I bought a SCSI 2 drive at work in 1991 £2000 for 2Gb. Quite an amazing bang for the buck nowadays!It does get hot but so I doubt you can use this for long in a normal Pi4 case - especially given I overclock the CPU and GPU. The M.2 case is neat BUT it does seriously degrade WiFi performance - probably a USB linked SSD might be a better option BUT careful as you may need powered USB - the Pi4 power supply doesn't supply a lot of current to USB bus and what little it does is shared.Bottom line - this M.2 SATA is working well