Western Digital 500GB WD Blue 3D NAND Internal PC SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s, M.2 2280, Up to 560 MB/s - WDS500G2B0B

Short versionPros:Has a DRAM CacheDecent performance and price for a midrange SSD5-year WarrantyCons:Non-discounted pricing is atrocious250G version is not the best dealLong VersionAs someone who frequently refurbishes old hardware others throw out, I tend to ignore the "midrange" of SSDs. Either I'll buy something ridiculously cheap (like that time when a 128G ADATA SU650 was at $16), or spend <$50 on a 256G NVMe and throw in a budget 500G SSD when they dip under $50 or an old hard drive. Generally I would stay away from the more "premium" SSDs since smaller capacities aren't that good of a deal, and as a student I would prefer to spend less on hardware that I'm not going to use daily. If it is hardware that I either care about or something I use heavily, I'll probably just go for something from Samsung, Micron, or a SK Hynix Gold when Woot puts it on a discount again.This time however, I had a 2012 Macbook Air where the original drive it came with was really showing its age, especially an unresponsive keyboard during login, so I decided I would swap out the drive while doing some overdue maintenance, using a SSD adapter for the 2012 Macbook Air. Compared to the original drive (which I forgot to take a screenshot of the test results), the sequential read performed better, from ~430MB/s to ~490MB/s with little change for sequential write. However, the system was quite smoother (less stutter that was caused by the drive), and even though it doesn't hit the advertised speeds, I'm still very happy with the upgrade.Generally the WD Blue is actually an SSD that I would recommend my friends to buy if they're on a bit more of a budget, just because it's not outrageously priced, the warranty and performance is pretty good from past experience, and it has a DRAM cache which makes it excellent for a boot drive. It's just not something I would buy normally because of the use scenarios I have. Would I recommend it? Yes, as long as you're not paying for more than ~$70 for the 500G version and you're not considering the smaller capacities. >$40 for a 250G SSD is a bit steep, and the only time when the 250G version became a good deal was when one of my friends bought it at $45 each on somewhere that's not Amazon (which is a horrible price), but they accidentally shipped him two drives and they got to keep both.

This sata based M.2 drive single handedly revived my Dell Inspiron 17 inch laptop. Boot times and access on my Dell had become intensely painful and it was 7 to 8 minutes from turning the pc on to actually being able to work. The install was extremely easy thanks to smart design on Dell's part. Win 10 immediately saw the drive and I used Paragon software to migrate my OS to the WD drive. On the next boot I opened my bios, reset the booth order, and was in Windows in less than 1 minute. My boot times have been in the 45 to 60 second range. My programs load faster, save faster, and are more stable.

My laptop came with a 128 GB SSD for Win 10 to run on. I was running out of room, so I upgraded to this 500 GB SSD. Very fair price for the memory, and I went with WD for the brand name rather than some unknown Chinese brand drive. I also purchased a QNINE M.2 to USB 3.0 Adapter to clone my original drive.I used Acronis True Image WD Edition to clone my drive. The software works fine. It says you must have on WD drive connected to the computer to use it. I had no trouble and my original drive is not a WD. My recovery partition was at the end of the 128 GB SSD. I tried other software first because of other reviews I had seen here for the WD drive cloning. Acronis was the only free solution I could find that would allow me to move that recovery partition to the end of the new 500 GB WD drive. I had to set the recovery partition end to the drive end and set the recovery partition size. Then I could make my system partition the maximum size, using the rest of the drive space.Once this was done, I opened up my laptop and swapped the drives. Powered up the laptop, and it just worked. Nothing else to it.

Good speed and boot time. I’ve had it for years and haven’t had to replace it!

I purchased an Acer E5-576-392H Laptop in December 2018. It came with 6GB RAM Memory and 1TB HDD. Well, it got to the point that the disk was operating at or about 100% all of the time. I did the usual disk defrags, clean-ups, antivirus things and everything I could find on YouTube. Nothing worked. Instead of trying my luck with the warranty, I decided to just spend the $65 for SSD card. As it turned out, the HDD was the issue. I now can completely reboot the system in 30 seconds and everything works very well. The installation only took about 10 minutes. The 500GB capacity is plenty for what I do, so I don't miss the 1TB HDD that was originally installed. Larger capacity SSD's are available if you need more.

Good quality SSD. A little pricey but competitively so. Always use a name brand for storage and critical components.

bought this in 2021 and still going strong in 2025. replacing it now to upgrade storage capacity, but otherwise very happy with the purchase. (i will note it was about 50% cheaper when i bought it though...)

These have got to be the coolest little SSDs yet! WD Blue drives have been a staple in PCs for years. Not to fade away into an artifact museum, Western Digital has brought to market the latest SSD technology at an affordable price. They have a product the can compete with Samsung on every level. The performance is exactly what you would expect from a top of the line SSD, at a competitive price. I have only one complaint, the blue and white label. I'm sure WD is proud of their logo and colors, as they should be. But an M2 drive installs directly on the motherboard. In a laptop this is not a problem. In a desktop with a side window, it sticks out like a sore thumb. I wish I would have paid extra for the Samsung simply for the aesthetics. If the aesthetics are not important to you, you won't find a better drive.