It had been over 10 years since i had done any type of computer upgrades. I think XP was still the predominant OS that last time I opened up a computer to do any type of work. I had gotten into the habit of just buying new every couple years and recycling. For the last couple months I had been researching new laptops, and while reading their Amazon Reviews, I noticed a re-occurring theme of dropping a good SSD in with a clean copy of Windows on a brand new machine. I started to go down the path of doing that myself, and got to reading about these Crucial SSD's. I decided that I'd just upgrade my existing laptop (HP 15-af131dx), the small BX500 was only $28, so if i wasn't satisfied I could just go with the original plan and buy a new laptop. Due to the cheap construction of this HP, accessibility was a little bit of a challenge, but I did it on my coffee table in under 15 minutes. I had a clean copy of Windows 10 on a thumb drive, popped it in, and turned on the power. The installer immediately started up, and I could tell immediately how quick this SDD was. Installation was only a few minutes long, and I've spent the last few hours re-installing my commonly used apps and trying them out. 'Astonished' doesn't even come close to describing my feelings. Everything is fast now. I can't believe I didn't do this sooner. I went ahead and ordered new RAM (even though i don't think i really need it) and will be installing that later this week, and there is no longer any need for me to buy a new laptop. This $28 shot in the dark ended up saving me hundreds of dollars on a new machine. I couldn't be more satisfied. Without a doubt the best money i've spent this year.
I upgraded from slow 5400rpm laptop drive to this 240GB SSD. The old drive was getting a CyrtalMark Seq score around 78 for Read &75 for Write, this drive is hitting 559 Read &515 Write! The boot time has gone from 1 min to 6 seconds! Highly recommended.
my core i3 Lenovo Yoga was becoming unusable, boot times, wake from sleep, internet. Since the Yoga can not upgrade RAM, I put the 120gb for $28 with a clean install of Windows 10. Now a restarts takes a few seconds and wake from sleep is as soon as I open the cover.
I ran the Crystalmark a few times since it was higher than the other posted ones and this is the lowest of my runs.
The drive is a 2018 model, Crucial answers any questions quickly, and I have bought from them for years without problems.
I have considered switching to an solid state drive for some time now . Now that I have I can't believe I waited as long as I did . My old laptop went from booting in minutes to booting in seconds . I mean that literally . Programs open almost instantly and they run lightning fast . My virus scanner now takes less then a minute for a full system scan . The installation is a snap . The drive comes with Acronis disk clone and it does all the work for you . I was worried because my old HDD was quite a bit bigger then the SSD is was migrating to , but the Acronis software handled it with no problem . You will need to buy a separate cable to connect the SSD drive to USB port so that you can clone your old disk image onto the new drive , but they are only a few bucks . The cloning didn't take long and swapping the drives only took a few minutes , and there videos on YouTube from Crucial that will walk you through the entire process . I would recommend watching the videos before beginning and I highly recommend buying one of these drives .
Used a usb 3.0 port and Startech USB to Sata cable to clone my old 5400rpm HDD.
Acronis will not work with windows 10 for this- at least I'm pretty certain it won't, and that's what Crucial supplies. Do a little searching and you'll quickly find the right software (free). After closing, installation was a breeze in my 550JK Asus laptop - simply swapped drives.
Now it boots in 15 seconds. The OS is about 10 times faster- programs open fully instantly (I'm working with 12gb ram and an i7-4710hq cpu) , multitasking is so good. The change is dramatic. For instance- before with Firefox and Explorer open HDD usage would be at 98%- now it's at 23% with those open according to process monitor. The read/write time is around 480/440 and used to be 60/50s.
Do yourself a favor and upgrade to an ssd if you've not. It makes more of an impact than any other upgrade, especially in a laptop. Most computers have a bad bottleneck in the system that causes slowdown and that is the spin up 5400-7200 RPM old fashioned HDD.
Also don't be afraid if you have a large spin up HDD- mine was 1TB and I was able to clone everything I needed to the 240Gb drive after deleting a few files I didn't need.
Feature Product
- Boot up faster. Load files quicker. Improve overall system responsiveness
- 300% faster than a typical hard drive
- Improves battery life because it's 45x more energy efficient than a typical hard drive
- Micron 3D NAND - advancing the world's memory and storage technology for 40 years
- Crucial 3-year limited warranty
Description
Ever wonder why your phone responds faster than your computer? It's because your phone runs on flash memory. Add flash to your laptop or desktop computer with the Crucial BX500 SSD, the easiest way to get all the speed of a new computer without the price. Accelerate everything.
For ordinary use, my four year old budget laptop now runs almost as fast as my new computer. The startup time is the huge difference, under a minute rather than minutes. Laptop came with a 500GB drive but this 240GB was plenty big enough as I was only using 80GB (I checked before I bought this drive). Crucial also has an easy to use scanner on their website that will tell you if the drive is compatible with your laptop and I ran it to make sure. Easy to install and I recommend a clean install and not cloning the old drive.
1) Backup your data files onto the cloud, USB, etc.
2) Download the Microsoft USB recovery drive creator and install it. Then run it. It will need a 16GB or larger USB flash drive in order to make the Windows 10 recovery drive and takes about an hour for it to run.
3) With my computer, a single screw holds the cover to remove the old hard drive. Remove the cover, slide out the old hard drive case and slide out the old hard drive from within shock-resistant case (you'll reuse it so be mindful).
4) Slide the new hard drive in the case, then slide the assembly into computer and attach cover and screw.
5) Plug in Windows 10 recovery drive you created earlier and start up the computer and follow the prompts to install the latest version of Windows 10.
6) Once installed, a good idea to turn on Windows system protection and create a recovery point. If you have problems, you can always reinstall the old hard drive and get tech support (which I didn't need).
It's that simple and now my old computer is dramatically faster and am very happy with the purchase!
I've lost track of how many HDDs I've replaced (for myself, family, friends) with SSDs over the last few years, but somewhere around 10. I installed the 120GB version of the BX500 in an old (2010?) HP laptop with a Core2 Duo, and it works well--better than the WD 7200 rpm drive that it replaced, which itself was an upgrade over the original 5400 rpm HDD. Battery life is noticeably longer, boot-up is much, much faster, and starting/closing apps is much improved. For a light-duty laptop used mainly for web-surfing, this is currently the best value on the market, because it comes with access to free, downloadable & fairly automatic software to "clone" your old drive. You will need USB-to-SATA3 interface (housing or adapter), but they are also fairly inexpensive, and once you have one, it can be used over and over. The tiny paper guide that comes in the package has a web address to download the software, but it returned a "502 Bad Gateway" error, so I google-searched "SSD support crucial" and found the top result (after the ad) helpful. (I can't post web address URLs here, or I would). The free, no-serial number Acronis True Image for Crucual software is what you're after. Bear in mind that you must have your BX500 connected to the PC or laptop in question via the aforementioned USB-to-SATA3 interface before and during the Acronis software installation. If you are looking for an SSD with an easy, nearly foolproof data migration (disk "cloning" software included, get a Samsung 860 EVO (but expect to pay about 3x as much for the smallest (250GB) drive they offer. The reviews of the BX500 indicate that the endurance of this drive is expected to be less than many other popular drives (it will eventually have write/read errors, causing the laptop to have crashes or other issues), but since this laptop is for fairly light-duty stuff (not gaming or multimedia editing/rendering), my experience with SSDs indicates that I needn't be concerned. Crucial is not a fly-by-night company. Good luck.
For a while i have been putting Inland SSD's in machines i build for others or very old machines with SATA of my own (core2 duo and older) since they are $19. On a SATA II machine this provides much faster responsiveness versus the Inland drives. As these are within $2 of the Inlands I will continue to buy BX500 for my needs. I have another 2007 thinkpad with 8gb ram and an inland 120gb yet my machine with a bx500 and only 1gb of ram actually responds faster 9 times out of 10. I also put this drive in a Thinkpad X240 which absolutely flies now with that drive. I left the 16gb m2 ssd in it for linux which i only would have given about 16gb of my ssd to anyway. There are no m2 2242 ssd's built by reputable brands and i don't need a lot of space in that machine so I went with a 256gb BX500 and it runs great.
I have not and probably never will use these drives on SATA III machines since anything i have that new uses M2 which is preferable to 2.5".
I upgraded and build a lot of computers—My go to budget drive used to be the Kingston 120GB SSD, but that is mearly a 2 channel drive where this Crucial drive is 4 chanels and I have actually seen 2x the speed. Did I mention this is $5 cheeper? I’ve been using Crucial and Kingston for years and now I trust Crucial’s value and proformence more than Kingston.
To top it off I bought 5 of these drives and all 5 seem to be working fine sitting at about 36-40°C so they don’t seam to cook themselves like some other drives. This means it should last. I’ve been seeing between 450-520MB/s sequential Read and similar Write speeds on my drives.
As seen in the photo 4 of the drives are being used for Vertual Machines. The other is in another system with no issues.
Bought two of these to upgrade and convert two MacBooks to SSD. It took me about three hours each to clone the drive through Disk Utility and install. Has gone from about fifteen seconds to five to boot, and shutdown is almost instantaneous. Has also reduced the weight slightly. Applications launch much quicker. Each upgrade added at least 100GB of space. Will buy again for other laptops I own, as I think I’ve become a solid state convert. Crucial lives up to their reputation, not the first product I’ve purchased of theirs, and certainly won’t be the last.
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