Intel530 SERIES 480gb 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive Reseller Kit (SSDSC2BW480A4K5)

The hardware itself works as expected. Haven't used it long enough to comment on the reliability though.Speed, what speed? When you buy a SSD, the least you should be concerned of is the speed. It is unfortunate that so many people are obsessed on reading specs which simply do not matter in real life.When it comes to SSD, all that matters is the reliability, because even the slowest SSD are fast enough, to a point that anything faster would be virtually unnoticeable in daily routine use.Reliability is an entirely different matter. In contrast to the speed, there are many unreliable SSDs out there. When they have problems, they tend to be very costly problems.Therefore, approach SSDs with a practical mind. It is not a gadget you can game with. Buy the most reliable, and forget about the specs.I chose to stick with Intel, both because of their track record, and because of my personal experience. I bought this SSD to replace a three-year-old Intel 320 SSD, which has had absolutely no problems on a system that is almost never shut down 24/7 in the last three years. I decided to replace it because I've run out of space on it.SOFTWARE PROBLEM:But I would like to alert users that the Intel data migration software is not a reliable tool. It is very easy to use, and works mostly, but fails to do a complete clone migration. I run into a problem, which is seemingly minor but time-consuming to fix. The QuickBooks Pro 2012 failed to recognize the license and therefore could not be run on the new drive after migration.I believe this problem with QuickBooks is not isolated. These programs probably are designed to defeat users transferring the program from one system to another. To prevent this, only an exact clone of the disk would work.I ended up erasing everything, and using the Windows 7 Restore to do the migration again. This method was far more difficult, and would need some fairly high level computer knowledge, but it did fix the problem of the QuickBooks Pro license problem.Here is how you do a restore on your Windows 7 (you need a backup hard drive in order to do this):(1) While you are still using your current system and current hard drive, go to Control Panel, and click on "Backup and Restore".(2) On the left side panel, click "create a system image", and follow the instructions to create a system image on your backup drive.(3) On the left side panel, click "create a system repair disc", and follow the instructions to create a system repair disc, if you don't already have one.(4) Make sure that your computer is set to boot from a CD drive..(5) Turn off your computer and connect your new SSD hard drive to your system. You may need to replace the old hard drive, but on some desktop computers, if you have enough power connectors and SATA connectors and cables, you may not need to take off the old hard drive. So it depends, but regardless, you will need your new SSD hard drive to be installed at this point.(6) Place the system repair disc in a CD drive, and reboot your computer from the system repair disc.(7) Choose in the system repair menu "repair using an existing image" (or something like that, I don't quite remember the exact phrase).(8) Select the backup drive on which you saved the system image as the source drive.(9) Select the new SSD hard drive as the target hard drive on which the system is going to be "restored to".(10) Follow the instructions to complete the process of restore. It may take up to 30 min. depending on the size of your drive.I know this is quite complicated, but this is a far more reliable method to ensure that you really are getting an exact clone of your hard drive. If you have some programs like QuickBooks on your system, this is how you get it work. The Intel data migration software failed on this important details although it does seem to work mostly.However, strangely enough, even with the windows system restore based on an image, Microsoft office document cache is messed up on the new drive after the restore. The regular functions of the Office work just fine, but office document cache does not. I had to manually fix it. It is not a very serious problem, though. You can probably ignore it and continue to use the Office because it will gradually build a new cache and leave the old one behind. But it was annoying enough that I felt it had to be fixed.Had it not been these problems, upgrading to this SSD would take less than an hour total, and it would be fun to do. But it was no fun to go about these nasty problems.To the end, all worked fine, but given the time that I had to spend on this to fix those problems, I wish I didn't have to make this upgrade.

!update 3/3/2016 On the very bottom is the update (pretty important)!Looking for vital information, below my experience review you'll probably find what you want.So I bought this since I was tired of having my OS on a Terrabyte hard drive and I wanted my OS to be isolated from everything else so it won't be affected. i went to install my OS windows 8.1, on a normaly on a HDD it takes around 1hr and 30 min to 2hrs. With this SSD it took less than 30 minutes to install heck not even 20. Orginally with my HDD it took 30 sec to 1 min for my PC to boot up. now it's less than 10 SECONDS!!! Take note I have a Intel core i3 3.5GHz along with 32GB. Considering I'm a college student and in the field of Computer Software Engineering/cyber security I want to make sure I've got enough ram and a decent processor to handle everything. Along with the solid state came a sticker with the words SPEED DEMON, and I have to say, it looks beautiful on my pc.Now to get to the important stuff.-If you want to make sure you can put it into your Tower PC you'll need the reseller kit as it comes with an extention for fit a 3.5 HDD slot/tray (screws included) or a black plastic add on for your Laptop (I'd recommend getting a larger SSD for a laptop so you have something to work with instead of constant worry over storage space.) It also comes with a SATA cable and a power supply cable.-Now some places it says that you need to do a few things in order to use a SSD. This is not the case, I simply hooked it up and installed my OS without any issues at all. (no there is no Driver and the disk that comes with the kit is only a bunch of manuals and warranty which you don't need to register it)-This Intel 530 SSD 120GB is most certainly large enough for an Operating System like Windows 7,8,8.1 and so on. I even have all my drivers (motherboard and graphics card) installed along with McAfee, Microsoft Office 2013, Google Chrome, Printer Driver and with it all up to date (with a lot more programs that come with windows 8.1) I still have 62.1 Gb left on it.*Size was my ultimate worry when it came to purchasing this product, which is why I am having this up for those with worry about storage space. you have enough space for essentials but I can't say you have enough for games.*-Note that you can make a SSD faster with TRIM but not having TRIM turned on will NOT affect an SSD, it'll just allow it perform better when uninstalling and reinstalling. I can't say this is something to worry about when it comes to something of this size since 120GB is not really enough space for gamers. Are there any cons with TRIM active, I wouldn't know since I'm not planning on using it since I have an OS on mine. I don't want to chance it.If you're asking, "Is buying this really worth the money I mean, it's seriously expensive?" Yes it's expensive but for the fact that it uses less electricity, runs faster, can take many more hits (falling on the ground or hammerd hits) than an HDD but the best part of all of these features, with Intel you get a 5 YEAR WARRANTY!!! 5 YEARS, just having that is worth the money.In short I am pleased with this product. It works very nicely. If you come up with issues then you had bad luck. Take note I'm reviewing this as a BRAND NEW product straight from Intel through amazon. Hope this review helps.!update!So it's been a little over a year now and my pc is still running at blazing fast speeds. after a year of having it I still have 38.1 GB (why below) left on it. I will probably be upgrading it soon though, you don't want to have too much on a SSD or any storage device other wise it'll have some issues and potentially crash. Other than that I'm still running just fine, to think I have 4 years of warranty left on this thing.I would like to point out the 16.5 of the data is due to my OneDrive automatically downloading and writing to it. I would advice disabling this feature on an SSD because it can shorten the life of it. I don't know if you can change the drive to download and write too but this should be something you should be aware of.

I've bought and installed two of these now over the past month. One was installed in a Dell XPS laptop, took less than two hours to install the drive and reload Win 7 from a clean copy on bootable USB stick + Office and a few other bits. It would have been under an hour, if I hadn't forgotten to pop the Dell drivers onto the USB stick before I started :( The XPs is very quick now. The Win7 perfromance indicator rates the drive at 7.9 out of 7.9 for performance. It really has saved me splashing out on a new laptop.So I repeated the trick with an Acer Aspire Netbook, took less than an hour and the Netbook is now usable again. Win 7 performance rates the drive at 7.7 out of 7.9 on this device.

Intel has always been my go to SSD since I purchased their 330 Model. They are always fast, reliable and come with decent tool. Tool for SSD while not essential in my opinion highly recommended. It checks SSD, "refreshes" it and overall ensures it is working as it should. On top of that you get information of SSD life estimation.While you can always go for cheaper SSD like Crucial - one of the best by the way, I always like to go step further and ensure warranty, support and quality is as it should be.p.s. these drives looks apart too. Nice metal construction with some Intel shiny logo. Not cheap - pure class.

I have been reminded of what fast means on a PC. Windows and Linux load in next to no time. Benchmarks show slightly better than what I was expecting. I was going to go for a Crucial drive initially but then I heard about them switching stuff around and selling inferior drives. This has made me extremely wary of the entire Crucial brand now. A bit of further research pointed me to this one. A great drive at a great price.

This Intel SSD is brilliant as any genuine Intel SSD products. It comes in the original Intel box with all mounting stuff and 5-year Intel warranty. I used it as a replacement of 7,200 rpm 500GB HDD on my ThinkPad T420. It works perfect and speeds up overall performance of the machine dramatically.Pros: top quality, brilliant performance, genuine Intel reliability.Cons: no.Very quick delivery by Amazon.If you need high performance reliable SSD then always buy Intel, I do so and never got disappointed.

Doesn't come with anything other than the drive so that would be nice but it didn't say it did so that's ok. Bought a 3.5 inch drive bay and cables for < a tenner at a high store store. Booted up, installed Xubuntu 14.04 all worked first time. Now have an almost zero boot time, fantastic. Would definitely recommend. It was this or the Samsung PRO but heard Intel has much better build quality, who knows. But very happy with this.