As of August 2015, the Samsung 850 EVO mSATA SSD (solid state drive) in 250 GB is the "sweet spot" for performance, cost and size in solid state drives. Installation is incredibly easy and the performance gains are huge and very noticeable. Software is not included, but can easily be downloaded from both Samsung and Seagate (which owns the Samsung hard drive business). If you're thinking of upgrading your computer, don't hesitate--as long as you have an empty mSATA connector (which is different from a regular SATA connector), this is a must-buy upgrade.
You typically would use an mSATA SSD as the boot drive in a notebook computer, in addition to a standard hard disk drive (usually in a notebook computer, it's rotating at a pokey 5400 rpm). Installation of this mSATA drive is as simple as opening up the notebook (my Lenovo computer required me to unscrew two screws to get at the innards) and simply plugging it in. My Lenovo required me to get a special small screw to hold the SSD in place, which was the most challenging part of the whole process.
Thereafter, you simply go into your operating system and make the disk active. From there, it becomes a trivial matter of having the time to transfer the system over. Seagate has "Seatools" (made by Acronis) available for download and it worked great at transferring my operating system from the old hard drive to this mSATA SSD. I had to disable "Safeboot" in the BIOS so that the Acronis software would prepare the drive, partition it properly and transfer the data over, but other than that, transferring was smooth as could be.
Previously, it took about 2 minutes for Windows 8.1 to finish loading; with this drive Windows 8.1 and (after upgrade) Windows 10 launch in just under 10 seconds. It's stunning.
Head over to the Samsung website and download Samsung Magician, which can cache your RAM and potentially increase performance even more. It's a free download which works for anyone with a Samsung drive.
My performance now on the notebook computer is out of this world. Highly recommended as an upgrade. This drive is large enough not only for the operating system but also for things which typically slow a hard drive down like Photoshop, video editing software, or games. Load those on this drive and your computing will be a lot faster, with space to spare.
| Standing screen display size | 5 Inches |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 500 GB Solid State Drive |
