Review on 💾 WD Blue 3D NAND M.2 2280 SATA III 6 Gb/s Internal PC SSD - 1TB, Up to 560 MB/s - WDS100T2B0B by Western Digital by Aaron Ayo

I won't say anything about the SSD performance, others have already done a good job there. My goal was to upgrade the original 256GB SSD in the Alienware 15 (R0 or R1, doesn't accept NVMe SSDs) to a larger 500GB. When I chose WD Blue, I was attracted by the combination of good reviews, price, and availability of Acronis True Image cloning software. Obviously, there are many options for cloning software, many of which are free and effective (look at you, Issei). I was pleasantly impressed with Acronis True Image. I installed an SSD (what the heck is a lack of an SSD with a damn screw? Pennies, maybe a dollar to include a screw in a $130 product?) and started Acronis. First, the new SSD could not be found: I had to bring the SSD "online" via the Windows computer management interface. Acronis gives you several cloning options: (1) an exact image that keeps all partition sizes and layouts as they were originally (so you don't get any size increase; you'll have to do that later); (2) Allow Acronis to increase target partition size at its own discretion; or (3) manually determining the location and size of the target partition. Option (2) doesn't work for me. My original SSD had about 6 partitions (many of which were recovery partitions, which I don't know if they were actually used but I'll find out later) and Acronis always chose the wrong partition to allocate additional space on the new SSD . So I opted for manual cloning which gives you an initial template of the exact image and then you can move and/or resize partitions on the target SSD. This way I preserved the partition order on the new SSD and allocated all the extra space to the "System" partition. The next problem is that I use Bitlocker on my drives. Acronis True Image does not clone Bitlocker-encrypted partitions, either online or offline (booting from Acronis boot disk or USB). So I had to disable bitlocker and decrypt my drives before cloning, which took a lot of time. After that, Acronis can start the cloning process. I left the cloning operation and turned to other things. I came back after a while (maybe an hour) to check what the next steps were for Acronis to complete the cloning process. I expected that I would have to set up the new boot device as a new SSD in Windows or via Acronis. I found that the computer has already rebooted with the new SSD as the new boot device, all partitions are properly configured as intended, and the old SSD is available and intact (except that it's no longer set as the boot device). Not bad. Pretty good. And how not to turn the damn screw? I won't cut stars because of this, but oh well. Of two competing SSDs with the same price/performance ratio, one contains a damn screw, which do you think consumers will buy?