Toshiba America Information Systems 2.5-Inch Q Series Pro PC Internal Solid State Drive HDTS312XZSTA

I have a nearly 5 year-old HP G60 laptop with an unremarkable Pentium 2.10 GHz processor. I successfully transferred the contents of my old HD to my new SSD using the provided NTI Echo software and a USB/SATA transfer cable. That process was slow on my laptop and took over an hour to transfer only about 55 GB of data. However, the process finished with no apparent errors. I then removed the old HD and installed the Toshiba SSD. This took me about 20 minutes mostly because of the tiny mounting screws. The new SSD fit perfectly into the old HD drive's mounting bracket. I had to restart my laptop twice for the drivers, etc. to synch up. After that my laptop ran perfectly. As expected, CPU related performance changed very little. However, the laptop's reading, writing, and loading times have improved considerably.I have to say that I am somewhat perplexed by some of the negative reviews that I have read concerning the NTI Echo software and/or the SSD itself. I don't intend to be mean, but I think that a lot of these folks would be better off having the Geek Squad or someone like that do the work of installing barebones products like this.7/3/2014 Addendum...How To Make NTI Echo work using Win 8/8.1.I forgot to mention how I got the NTI Echo software to work in a Win 8/8.1 environment. I got tired of reading all the reviews wherein the writers were whining that the product didn't work using Win 8/8.1. So I contacted NTI for explanation. It turns out that there is indeed a bug in the software. I was advised by them to temporarily disable the drivers for any memory card (SD, CF, etc.) readers present in my environment. There are 4 such drivers in my system. This sounded a bit peculiar but it was simple to do. Sure enough, the Echo program then worked. When I was sure that I was done using the Echo program, I re-enabled the drivers. NTI said that they would be fixing the bug "soon".

So far, so good! I installed the SSD on a nearly new Lenova desktop PC with Intel Core i5-3330 CPU running Win 8.1 Update. The installation went relatively well after overcoming the initial stumbling block of dealing with Toshiba's suggested software, which supposedly would work with the drive. Never could get it to install on my PC; keep getting weird error messages. Instead, downloaded and ran EaseUS Todo Backup 6.5: Yay! Cloned my old C: drive and got things up and running without a hitch. Note: I didn't have to jump through hoops deleting lots of files before cloning because, being almost new, my old C: drive was not bloated. Physically installing the drive was simpler than I anticipated. I used a Silverstone Tek 3.5 to 2 X 2,5-inch bay converter and a Monoprice 18-inch SATA III cable for the conversion installation. (Uh, it does kinda suck that they don't include a SATA cable with the drive, but that is not a deal breaker if you realize up front that you have to allow for that.) After reading reviews of problems others have had with similar SSD installations, I was pleasantly surprised that all screws and holes lined up perfectly -- both between the SSD and the bay converter and between the converter and the drive bay -- and the hardware installation took, oh, maybe seven minutes. Thanks to numerous product reviews, how-to videos on YouTube and C-Net, and info on the WindowsSecrets website, I had it much better getting up and going than the pioneers who took the digital arrows in their backs while working out the kinks. I'm really enjoying the boost in speed and have no complaints so far.

Final update:Just got word from the computer tech that the drive was corrupt. Now costing an extra $130 to fix.3rd update:Now my computer won't even start. (2nd picture). Someone better pay for this to be serviced!2nd update:Well, I tried to shut off my computer to take this drive out, and the pic is the error I keep getting. It keeps trying to restart, then this error pops up. Wtf?!?!1st Update:I did initially give this item 3 stars due to my original post (below), but after a couple of hours, I constantly hear my computer/fan revving up...this is supposed to be silent! Returning item.(Original post a couple of hours prior to my update)I had recently purchased a new laptop that came with a 250GB SSD...this was not enough space, so I purchased this 500GB. It took a couple of hours to xfer/install (btw, you have to buy a separate SATA-->USB cable for the xfer). While so far, everything seems to be working, it has noticeably slowed my computer down at startup. Mind you, it's still fast compared to an HDD...but it's slower that the SSD that I just replaced. So that's kind of disappointing.

I purchased the Toshiba 128GB Q Series SSD as an experiment to see whether there would be a noticeable performance improvement in my environment. A brand-new, Dell AIO computer with Windows 7 64-bit was configured to run on our Windows network. The OptiPlex 9020 performed well with its standard internal hard drive but now runs fantastically well with its SSD. Boot-ups and log-ons were often time consuming often requiring several minutes. Now Windows 7 boots up in about 15 seconds and the network user logon takes only about 20 seconds beyond that. The Toshiba is sold as and arrives as a drive-only package so desktop users will need to purchase an adapter bracket elsewhere. The drive is lightweight and well-built, shipping in a heavily-padded and compact box. Free migration software is included as a URL to a download and, once a couple of kinks were worked out, was easy to use and perfectly adjusted migrating from a 500GB hard drive to the 128GB Toshiba SSD. The kinks were a USB-SATA cable that did not work - I wound up using an external USB drive housing; and Dell's BIOS setting enabling RAID, even though the PC has only one internal drive - fixed by selecting a non-RAID drive configuration in BIOS. After a couple of weeks of use I love the drive and its excellent performance and would happily purchase additional drives in future.