The device seems quick and it was reasonably priced, but I have been unable to make it work as an internal system drive replacement in a laptop. I purchased an external USB-SATA cable so I could clone the computer's existing hard drive and I used the provided link to a one-time-use version of EZ-GIG software to clone the existing drive. The software reported complete success, so I replaced the computer's system drive with the SanDisk SSD (That's a MAJOR pain for an Acer Aspire V5; it requires considerable disassembly because the drive is inexplicably under the keyboard.) The computer immediately displayed a setup version of the Blue Screen Of Death. It said there was no system disk installed, though it cryptically also listed the SanDisk SSD as an installed device. I played with settings on that setup page but was unsuccessful. I removed the drive and checked it out with the USB-SATA cable on another computer. It seemed to be properly formatted and partitioned, so I tried again thinking perhaps I had not seated the connectors properly. Same result.
I don't know what the issue is. The computer defaults to a UEFI instead of a BIOS, so perhaps that's the problem. Maybe the software didn't set up the partitions correctly because the new drive is somewhat larger than the original, though that seems a pretty common thing for a hard drive replacement. It may be fixable but I haven't yet spent the time because it's such a pain to replace the drive in that computer. Maybe I'll try again when I have hours for troubleshooting and waiting for tech support. For now it's just gathering dust; it probably would make a speedy external drive if I wanted to use it that way. If I figure out how to make it work, I'll update this review.
UPDATE:
I finally had time to spend a day fiddling with this disk and it's now operational so I added a star to this rating. I must say that SanDisk responded very promptly to my request for support. When my computer would not boot from the SSD, I submitted an e-mail support request on the SanDisk Web site. They responded within a few hours with a solution that ultimately worked, though it was painful to implement.
SanDisk said there was likely something wrong with the operating system on the computer that caused the clone to the SSD not to boot, though I had not had any previous trouble with the computer. They suggested plugging in the SSD as an external drive and using the Windows command line program "diskpart" to completely wipe off all the data and partitions, then installing the SSD into the laptop and using a recovery disk to re-install Windows. That worked perfectly. The problem, of course, is that it took the better part of a day to physically swap the disks, re-install Windows, re-upgrade from the Windows 8 recovery to Windows 10, re-install the other software, and copy all the data files from backup.
I'm withholding the final star because the promised easy cloning process didn't work and the one-time license of the software didn't allow any fiddling to get it to work. The SSD hardware, though, is now working very well and has added welcome "snap" to an aging laptop.
| Hard Drive | 960 GB 1x960GB |
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