Issues with my Dell laptop prompted this purchase. Simply firing-up and shutting-down was taking a ridiculously long few minutes to accomplish so I began leaving the computer on all the time. That not only wastes electricity but subjects the device to needless wear and tear along with exposing it to security threats.
Additional problems include the system regularly slowing down whenever I opened programs, and the screen frequently refreshed itself, making me wait while everything vanished and then slowly re-drew itself. File copies, downloads, and even web surfing had slowed down to the point that it was frustrating to use.
So, before scrubbing the hard drive and heading to electronics recycling, I decided to install this Solid State Drive and reorganize the storage configuration so that the operating system is on the new drive and the programs and data remain on the old drive. If the new drive can reduce the start time to under 30 seconds, I would consider it a win.
Installation of the drive was very easy. It is a memory card similar to the RAM in all computers, so it just needs to be pushed into a socket and secured with the included screw. Specifically, installing into my Dell laptop, involved removing a plastic hatch on the bottom of the device held in place by two Phillips screws.
Once the mSATA SSD was installed, it appeared as the primary hard drive in the Windows File Explorer and the disk management tools. Next I installed a fresh copy of Windows 8.1, and followed instructions I found on the internet to reconfigure the computer.
Performance has been drastically enhanced. Now the computer is almost "instant on", starting in under 20 seconds, and all of the other issues are resolved. The operating system and virtual memory are only using about 36 GB of the 128 available, so there is potential to make even more improvement. And, so far the performance has been excellent with no problems.
| Hard Drive | 128 GB Solid State Drive |
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