Crucial MX500 500 GB CT500MX500SSD1(Z)-Up to 560 MB/s (3D NAND, SATA, 2.5 Inch, Internal SSD), Metallique

This SSD arrived yesterday (Very quick free delivery). It was purchased to replace an old hard drive in my desktop tower. For those that don't know much about SSD's (apart from them being fast), it's a very lightweight and small drive. Transfer rates on my old Seagate hard drive were thereabouts 140MB/s. While transfer rates with this SSD are more like 500MB/s so a noticeable speed increase.Installation was simple. It just requires a SATA cable and power connector (that the majority, if not all desktop psu's have).My plan was to do a clean windows install on this SSD, backup all the important files from my Seagate drive and disconnect it so I only have this SSD running in my machine. I will go through steps, problems and how I resolved things.So, after plugging this drive in, I booted Windows 7 from my old hard drive. This SSD wasn't showing up at all. So I went to the start menu and in the search box typed 'disk'. From that list I clicked 'create and format hard disk partitions' (also can be found directly in control panel). The drive showed up. When clicking on it, it gave me the option of GPT or MBR. I'm very computer literate, yet it's been years since I replace a hard drive, but looking online, it seemed MBR was the most suitable for my use. After selecting, the drive auto formatted and was showing up.Next, installing Windows 7 on this SSD (I refuse to use Windows 8 or 10 as I just don't like those OS's). I had Windows install files backed up from DVD on my Seagate HD. I copied all files over to the SSD and started up the installer. It installed.... great.... job done. I then backed up all the important stuff from my Seagate drive to this SSD and that was that....Well.... sort of...I unplugged the Seagate drive and booted my computer up...... 'reboot and select boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device'.... Great (not).... Although I had a suspicion that Windows 7 installer had created the boot partition on my Seagate drive and that was what the problem was.I put the Seagate drive back in booted into the SSD install of Windows 7 and downloaded 'EasyBCD' (free software that can swap the boot partition). I clicked 'BCD Backup/Repair' in the app then under 'BCD management options' clicked 'change boot drive', then 'perform action' and selected this SSD as boot drive.... Done.Again I turned the computer off, disconnected the old seagate drive, turned it back on and..... Perfect, all working fine.Depending on how you choose to use the drive, installation steps may differ but I wanted to share my experience in case it helps anyone else. In my situation I didn't need to clone a drive, but just do a fresh windows install and copy important files over to it.A great drive overall and hopefully it will last me many years

I bought this to replace the drive in a mid-2009 MacBook Pro running El Capitan with 8GB RAM. It had been upgraded through the versions of Mac OS since new and, due to the enormous amount of time spent shutting down and startup up again, restarting had become something of a no-no. Booting would take 5 minutes or more just to get to the login screen - with probably another 2-3 minutes until it was ready after logging in. Faced with the possibility of having to replace the laptop (and not being keen on the lack of upgradability of the latest MacBooks, or the ditching of the MagSafe charger) I figured upgrading the drive to an SSD and re-installing the OS was worth doing to stave off the expenditure of an upgrade for at least another 6 months.The drive itself is physically lighter than a traditional mechanical one so your laptop gets a bit lighter - the drive feels like an empty box when you pick it up. Installation is pretty easy & quick if you have the appropriate small phillips and torx drivers. The drive comes with a plastic spacer to ensure it fills the space (rather than being too thin). Being an SSD the drive is also completely silent when running, so the laptop is now eerily quiet during normal operation and doesn't clunk when you move the laptop (mechanical drives park the drive head to prevent damage). It should also be using less power (but that's a tricky one to check).But the really big thing is the MASSIVE increase in performance. The OS now boots so fast that you feel the CPU has suddenly become the only bottleneck at startup. Starting apps is faster than I ever remember it being - if you've ever wondered why Pages or Numbers is so sluggish to start up, you need one of these. Pages now takes 3-4s to start and load a document. Switching users (with quick user switching) is 3-4s. Wake from standby is fractionally quicker too as it no longer has to spin the drive up before being ready.The OS now takes just 30s from pressing the power button to being ready - shutdown takes 7s (or less). To put those figures into perspective, my 64GB iPhone 6 (iOS 11.3) takes 47s from pressing the button to being ready, 16s to shutdown - yes, that's right, my 9 year-old MacBook Pro now boots and shuts down faster than my iPhone. That is just a crazy concept.Obviously I can't comment on the longevity but then I'm running a laptop that's already unable to run the latest Mac OS - it's likely the laptop will have to go before the drive gives up. If you've got a slow laptop (Mac or otherwise), upgrade to an SSD and revel in the feeling that your ageing laptop probably now outperforms a brand new laptop with a mechanical disk.

Loading times and system responsiveness are completely transformed with this drive, replacing the HDD with this SSD. Windows 10 (fresh install) regularly loads in well under 15 seconds, and Chrome, Office, Teams, WhatsApp, Ragnarok Online (it's the fiancé's laptop!), Twitch can all run whilst still feeling snappy and responsive.Installation was straightforward, all that was necessary was one screwdriver although the screws were taken from the laptop, they were not provided. This was fine, as it was replacing a HDD rather than being a fresh install.I also moved the old HDD into a caddy, which was then installed in place of the optical drive of the laptop. So now the laptop has this MX500 as its primary drive, running Windows 10, and a second HDD drive in place of the optical drive. I did expect the system to feel more responsive, it was taking minutes to load and then minutes more until it was usable; but my expectations were exceeded, the system is so fast it actually boots slightly quicker than my desktop PC (also running Crucial SSDs).Fantastic drive, and based on my desktop PC, these drives are also entirely reliable and great value.