ADATA SU800 256GB 3D-NAND 2.5 Inch SATA III High Speed Read & Write up to 560MB/s & 520MB/s Solid State Drive (ASU800SS-256GT-C)

For my programming and media uses, I picked this 1TB SSD because of the speed and the fact I wanted an onboard memory/hard drive device for my raspberry PI.I find it very reliable, very responsive when retrieving documents, and I am able to do things like write programs while blasting my music, stored on the SSD (I have close to 5000 songs loaded on my card) and using the VLC player, I've created playlists where I can just leave the songs crank on my three-speaker system that was part of one of my windows PC media centers, so it has its own power source and doesn't draw it from the raspberry PI card, and right and run my own code.I've been running it now for close to three weeks nonstop as I now use my raspberry PI as my main computer, and I've had no issues with the memory card at all. I've had no lost files I've had no corrupted areas, and the SSD card comes up immediately.The only thing I wish I could've done differently, and this is due to my inexperience in Raspberry and forgetful of my UNIX days, is to properly set the card up so that my device just boots from the microSD card and everything else is stored on the SSD memory. What I wish I could've done differently was as soon as I created the first partition was to format the SSD into a 1TB partition rather than let it create thousands of partitions as I add new files and programs.No I gave this card a three star rating or ease of installation because when you look at the photo and the lack of anything in the description, it seemed like it would fit one of the cases that I purchased, but when I got it I was rudely awakened to the fact that it does not fit. So my advice to you is unless you plan to 3D print your own case, if you are used to an open air system for your raspberry PI, then this actually would be a five star installation. But be careful when trying to purchase a case to enclose this SSD card. My next raspberry PI will use the shorter SSD cards and they will fit in a double height case.

Amazon provided timely delivery and adequate packaging with their usual air pillows. ADATA's packaging included a plastic tray slid into a reasonably-sized box containing: one SSD, one adapter plate (e.g. used within some laptops to adjust for drive thickness) and one booklet - no drive screws included (generally not required for drive swaps or laptop installations whereby existing screws are often re-purposed). Light in mass (essentially SMT electronics and a flash chip on a PCB housed within a plastic case), the SSD securely mounted into a separately purchased 2.5"/3.5" drive adapter caddy (which came with HDD screws) and easily slid into my legacy desktop's drive bay. It accepted standard SATA power and data cable connections. Turning on my PC and entering BIOS, the new drive was automatically recognized. The drive was readily partitioned and formatted by Windows during a fresh install of W10P64 via DVD ISO. In effort to manage drive space, the SSD was designated as a primary boot drive for my OS and key programs, while user libraries (data and games) were re-directed to a secondary mechanical drive. Although not a race horse in the SSD world, this drive substantially trumped my 7.2k spinners in terms of Windows' initial load time. It also streamlined time frames for web page and program loads. Regarding personal cost/benefit qualitative considerations - it's been a winner for me thus far. Although only owned for a few weeks, my experience has been favorable enough for me to install three more ADATA SSD boot drives into the PC's used by my kids and spouse. Long-term reliability is unknown, but short term boot-time savings has been a pleasure!

I installed this in a Dell Precision M6500 that had a 2TB Samsung drive in it. The M6500 has space for two 2.5 inch HDDs, so I left the Samsung in bay 0 and installed the SU800 2TB in bay 1. I used Reflect disk cloning software from Macrium to clone the Samsung to the SU800 (I highly recommend this software). I own a licensed copy, but there is a free personal version that will work just fine for this. After cloning I went into the M6500's BIOS and swapped the boot order so that it would boot from drive 1 first, then drive 0 (if drive 1 failed). It then booted right up off the SU800, about 8X faster than from the Samsung. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 on an i7 X940 @ 2.13GHz HT (8 cores) with 32GB RAM and an NVIDIA 5000. My Windows Experience Index was always 5.6 because of the HDD (out of 7.5 max). Now with the SU800 as the primary HDD, the Index is 7.2 and the HDD maxes out at 7.5. I have not performed speed tests but everything disk I/O related is far faster than before, it's really amazing. And this is a drive in a machine that is 6+ years old, with over 1TB of data and just over 12M files. One comment, if you use Reflect you can set it up to auto clone daily to a backup drive. I left the original Samsung 2TB drive in bay 0, and now I am cloning the SU800 to the Samsung every night as an automatic process. It runs a smart sector copy that only copies changes, so the clone process is very fast. But in this way, should the SU800 fail the system will still boot and run from the original Samsung. Because no matter now far SSDs have come, I am still somewhat skeptical as to long-term reliability. If you switch to an SSD as your primary (which I highly recommend), install cloning software and clone/backup your SSD to a conventional drive! Few final comments.. this thing is dead quiet (obviously) and pulls only a fraction of the current as the Samsung. Overall, I am very pleased with this purchase.