Review on 💨 Sleek and High-Performance Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 120GB SSD - MZ-7TE120BW by Richard Summerall

I bought this drive to replace the original Western Digital 160GB (SATA I) drive in my Inspiron 1525 laptop. Cellphone supports up to SATA II. However, any increase in speed over the slow WD drive would be welcome. Since this laptop will only be used for internet, email, and the occasional Microsoft Office document, I decided to save some money and go for the 120GB version. I only use about 42GB and have plenty of cloud and external storage if needed. I've narrowed it down to this drive and a Crucial m500 of the same capacity. Samsung ultimately benefited from the higher advertised read/write speeds and the included drive migration software. Both come with a 3-year warranty and are similarly priced. After cleaning up the clutter and defragmenting the source drive, I installed the migration software. For some reason I couldn't transfer the data to the new drive and got error messages about halfway through. After two attempts, I uninstalled the Samsung software, installed EaseUS Todo Backup Free, and used it to clone my drive. The EaseUS software worked great. Here are some comparisons of boot times between source and SSD drives: First boot to login: 43 seconds First desktop login: 93 seconds Total time: 136 seconds SSD boot to login: 21 seconds SSD desktop login: 16 seconds Total time: 37 seconds As you can see, the loading time has improved significantly. They're still not as fast as I expected, but maybe 32-bit Vista or the SATA II interface are the limiting factors. This laptop has 4 GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 (2.5 GHz) processor. If I disable the user password, the total boot time drops to 32 seconds. The shutdown took 8 seconds with the original drive and 5-6 seconds with the SSD. Here are the SSD sequential read/write speeds on CrystalDiskMark: 50MB: 250.9/197100MB: 250.9/199.8500MB: 250.9/201.11000MB: 251.7/2002000MB: 258/ 196.34000 MB: 250.9/183.7 Overall I am happy with the performance of this drive. It boots much faster compared to the original, loads programs within 1-2 seconds and slightly extends the lifespan of this laptop.