Intel Solid State Drive Toolbox Windows 10

I decided to use an old Intel solid state drive as a tertiary backup unit for images.

I'm using it as the D drive in an Intel NUC, with Windows 10 installed on an SSD C drive. This WD Blue model is an SMR drive. I don't know that I would recommend it as a primary system drive but I have never tried that. I needed a high capacity low profile second drive. This one works great for that kind of usage.

I purchased this product to move the Windows virtual machine that I run on my MacBook Pro under VMWare Fusion off my internal storage because I was running out of space on the laptop's solid state drive. While I haven't run benchmarks, it appears it to start up and run the Windows apps as fast (or maybe only very slightly slower) than from the Macbook's internal solid state drive. It is an excellent product for this application.

Solid state drive worth it.

excellent little solid state drive - and powerful

Perhaps the best solid state amp you can get for under $10,000? If not, within a hair of that.

I used this drive to clone a laptop hard drive to a solid state drive. Worked well.

The Intel NUCs hit in (almost) every way for a mini PC. If you can use a small but powerful machine, definitely consider one of these. Here at B&H I got the barebones i3 kit (without the drive or any memory) and installed MS Windows, memory, and the drive myself. Two tips for self-installers based on the other reviews: 1) Pressing the power button for three but *not* four seconds takes you to a menu allowing you to set options like boot order, make sure LAN is turned on, etc. 2) If installing Windows 11, you might only need to download the wireless driver to a USB and run the driver installer from there after Windows install to get connectivity. Afterwards, Windows Update will help you take care of the rest of the drivers, BIOS updates, etc.

With one word of caution. AT THIS WRITING AMD processors support the new PCIE 4.0 standard that this drive operates on. Intel processors are not scheduled to be released that support this new protocol until 2021. I paired this drive up with a non PCIE 4.0 Intel chipset (based on the product's advertisement that it is backwards compatible). I can say truthfully it is not backwards compatible. When I employed this drive I received error, after error, after error from Windows 10, notwithstanding that Samsung has not yet even released a Windows driver for this drive. It used the Windows 10 default 2006 Microsoft driver to operate with. Once I took it out of that system and put in a PCIE 3.0 drive that the system supported, all errors disappeared. Intel processor users will just have to wait until later this years when Intel chipsets supporting this new protocol are are mainstream.

I recently got a SanDisk 1TB SSD (Solid State Drive) and used a drive cloning device to clone my old 1TB Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to the new SSD. It works wonders in my 15 year old computer! It really speeds up drive-related activities, perhaps as much as 3 or 4 times faster. I think my old HP laptop computer is either a SATA or SATA II type, so I suspect those with a SATA III system would see even better speed results when going from a HDD to a SSD. Gotta love it!