Pros: Good performance overall, balanced read/write performance. So far 4 drives purchased over the last 9 months, have been in heavy use with no failures or performance degradation.

Cons: Not one of the fastest drives available.

Other Thoughts: Many other drives in this price range are TLC, and seem to have inferior write performance and likely less write endurance than this drive.

As with any high-capacity drive, I did notice that this reduced effective battery life of my Broadwell-based laptop a small amount. I ended up replacing it with a smaller 250GB (also MLC) model with reduced power use.

Pros: Full capacity seen by Windows. Packaged well.

Cons: Failed out of the box with click-of-death. The read arm was slamming the hdd case so hard it was audible from the outside of the laptop.

Putting the drive in a USB shell and mounting it vertically did not help.

Although Windows recognized the drive it could not be formatted, read from, or written to.

Other Thoughts: There was no shipping or ESD damage, failure was immediate and the controller chip was clearly working.

There must have been mechanical damage done at the factory, which means a quality control problem. This drive should not have been boxed and sold to a retailer.