SAMSUNG 840 Series MZ-7TD500BW 2.5" 500GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Pros: I have five SSD Samsung drives. So far I've had good Luck with all of them. Got 2 more Samsungs on the way.

Cons: Watch out for the shipping method UPS Mail Innovations Origin. It takes longer to reach your destination.

Pros: I've owned several SSD's (everything from Kingston to Crucial), and this drive sets the standard for speed. Windows rating maxed after I installed.

Cons: None. Great drive.

Pros: Great SDD for the money - works well. Purchased two, one for my laptop one for the wife's. Very satisfied with performance.

Cons: Cloning software included is useless junk. Refused to close drive on either my laptop (Dell) or the wife's (HP). Drive would not format using standard Win7 Disk Manager, either.

Other Thoughts: I finally succeeded in being able to use these drives using Macrium Reflect free software. Nothing else would work, including other so-called cloning freeware. Most would not even recognize the drive; those that would refused to format it or clone it. Hats off to Macrium or I would have been returning these as unusable.

Pros: Fast, light, and compatible with my Dell Vostro 2520 laptop.

Samsung's software made this the easiest SSD install ever!
The data migration tool worked flawlessly -- I put the SSD in a generic SATA dock, followed the prompts to clone the old hard drive, then made the switch... Windows started right up, same as before except MUCH faster. No fiddling or technical knowledge required.
The SSD Wizard took care of all the relevant Windows settings, and made it easy to understand and fine-tune the performance options.

Cons: In theory, this drive has a much shorter lifespan than standard MLC drives like the 840 Pro series.

Other Thoughts: This is the same drive and software you get with the "kit" (MZ-7TD500KW). The kit just adds a 3.5" bracket and a USB-SATA data transfer cable.

Pros: 1. Fast
2. Great value
3. Easy to install
4. Big

Cons: 1. Didn't include any mounting hardware but I always have some on hand.

Other Thoughts: At < $1 / GB this drive is a great value and Tom's Hardware says that the Samsung 840's all scream.

Pros: Fast drive but I've only had it for one day.

Cons: Drive shut down when attempting to install applications after Operating system install. When OS attempts to install large applications such as MS office or Service pack 1 for Windows 7, the drive will shut off. After Drive has been running for more than an hour, the drive shuts off.

Other Thoughts: I'm sending this back for a new one in hopes that this is just a bad drive.

Pros: Small, compact, light weight and easy to install.

Just a make sure you have a 2.5 to 3.5 converter mount, or a bay drive that holds 2.5 inch drives. Also if you use an SSD in a bay drive that acts as a middle man interface between the drive and the motherboard, make sure the data speed is 6gb/s, or else you may have data transfer problems. For example if the bay drive has 3gb/s top speed.

The drive improved the performance of my programs like photoshop. The load time increased significantly, at least 25% or higher.

I don't care much about boot times, I switched from win 7 to win 8, it seems windows 8 is less bloated but the power shell it uses can take a few seconds to load. With an SSD most PC's should boot faster though.

Doesn't have any moving parts, so speed with writing and reading is fast, just realize though until SSD's become more affordable the size limit people can purchase will still be limited to around 256gb to 500gb, so most people use external traditional hdd's. So the OS being on the SSD is still at mercy reading from drives with actuator arms and metal platter disks.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Anyone who purchases SSD's make sure to realize that you don't need to defragment them. A long list of reasons why you don't need to, but the best excuse is that defraying an SSD reduces its life expectancy greatly, all the random read and writes during a defrag will wear it out.

Just a heads up.

Pros: The usual: fast, fast, fast. Price. Capacity.

Booted. Loaded Windows & software. Up and running in 30 minutes.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: As to reliability, time & use will tell.

The other reviews were valuable. The good and the bad.

About ten years ago bought two Raptors, 150 Gb each, SATA 1.5 on sale (the 3.0 Gb version was just released). Believe I paid about $200 each. Fast forward to today. Dramatic speed increase at a reduced cost. Reliability to be determined. The Raptors are still singing.

This is my third Samsung SSD. Went from 128 Gb to 256 Gb to this unit. The other two quickly found new homes.

Kudos to Newegg for the two day delivery (doesn’t always happen).

Pros: I waited until I ran this drive for a couple of months before writing a review. This drive replaced an older model SSD from another manufacturer. In short this drive is fast, reliable, and easy to install.

Cons: Slow if installed incorrectly.

Other Thoughts: Make absolutely certain you create your partitions on a 4k boundary or your write speeds will be compromised. If you run the included performance benchmark and your write speeds are a third, or less, of max performance than this is likely your problem. In windows the DISKPART command has a parameter called ALIGN which makes this easy.

Pros: Large capacity, very fast compared to 7200 rpm HDD. My laptop boots to Fedora 16 KDE in about 12 seconds. Resume from suspend is so fast that it is done by the time the laptop lid is fully opened. Great way to rejuvenate an "old" laptop.

Cons: Buggy provided software locked up my laptop. I had to download a new version from Samsung's web site. Even so, it didn't recognize and copy my linux partitions. In the end, I booted with a Linux Live CD and used dd to clone the HDD, which fortunately was exactly the same capacity as the SDD.