... the reviews that put down the speed of this wonderful SSD. I had absolutely no experience with SSD ...
356453
I laugh at the reviews that put down the speed of this wonderful SSD.  I had absolutely no experience with SSD and all I can tell you is this little devils screams. It rocks watching programs that crawled before rip it up.  I wanted to see if an SSD and graphics card would speed a very graphics intensive game that I play all the time.  The answer is absolutely.  It takes seconds to load the software versus minutes.
1714349
I'll update this review once I've finally seen the light of the SSD, this is my new main HDD in my new PC along with a couple older 7200 rpms's  for storage. I've never owned one, and now I do.  Let's see if the  hype lives up to it.
4523896
I will never go back to a spinning hard disk.  I run my OS on the SSD and store my data on a Raid 1 one terrabyte disks.  It takes 40 seconds for my OS to load which isn't bad.  I am running this SSD on an older PC.  It roughly took 15 minutes to re-image a 30GB WIM file over a gigabit Ethernet connection.  This thing is dope!!!! I am sure over time these SSD's will come down in $$$.
1761197
My first SSD and I am in love. I get around 6 second boot times now compared to the 15 I had running Raid 0 on 7200 RPM drives. I see a average transfer speed of 350 MBPS via USB 3.0 I plan on upgrading to a 512GB drive this christmas and I will be buying OCZ Agility series again.
44809
After a botched shipping mishap for the new Intel 335 SSD I decided to go with this drive.  I installed this on an ASROCK X58 motherboard system doing a fresh install of Windows 7 64.  After doing a little preparation to get Windows 7 install on a USB drive I was up and running with a fresh install of Windows with necessary drivers in less than 20 minutes.

I am absolutely blown away by the performance even on a SATA II based system.  The throughputs are maxed out around 290mb/s like other reviewers of SATA II systems, but even at this throughput I am amazed at what a huge difference in performance it makes over ANY regular HDD drive even the 10k Raptor drives in raid configurations.

I can boot completely to desktop, even with password entry, in 20 seconds.  Any Office app, Web page, or game starts in a mere second or two.  As a gamer my favorite part is normally the level loads, transition cut scenes, etc. come up in a fraction of the time now.

So you can try to compare SSD to SDD and whether one gets 460mb/s vs 490mb/s, but you will never likely ever see the difference.  Just get a SSD that has proven reliability, a decent controller, and enough capacity and you'll be set.  I originally wanted an Intel for reliability, but Kingston was a very close runner up and I have loved every second owning this thing.

As anecdotal evidence of how well this works, my wife thought I bought an entire new computer when I installed this.  Even after loading up the drive with a dozen games and other programs, and using it for awhile, she still thinks I installed a completely new computer.  My wife also commented on how she thought the hard drive was "broken" when she didn't hear the normal "grinding" associated with HDD, especially on shutdown.  She is just tickled that everything just springs to life instantly.

If you're on the fence, even at this price point and you only have a SATA II interface, don't hesitate! Just go ahead and click the add to cart button now!
2858089
I am a HUGE Samsung SSD fan! I was really looking forward to using this drive in my X1 Carbon (Thinkpad), but unfortunately is not recognized by it, even though it should be. This drive is INCREDIBLE though! Talk about fast & reliable soldered into a single device. I have hundreds of Samsung 850 drives in my organization and I can only assume that the reliability of this 950 is on par with the rest.
1478238
Replaced my disk drive on my MBP with this inside a HD caddy. This is my first SSD, and it's absolutely amazing, the speeds are incredible. And the price is excellent!
2110982
at the beginning it was a normal speed, but after i overlocked it at 3.5 Ghz it works at the speed of light! It shuts down in 7 seconds with HDD. I can't imagine whats going to happen if i get SSD! It'll probably move to warp speed, not just the speed of light! all it needs now is 4 GB of ram and SSD solid drive to work at its best. I'll do that soon, it's going to blow up!
3781299
My DELL Precision M6600 Windows performance went from 7.9 to 6.5 after installing this.
I had a CRUCIAL SSD (that was 250GB), upgraded to 1TB with the SAMSUNG.

I spent the time reading and optimizing everything it suggesting, BIOS Settings changes, etc.

I have 2 SSD drives in my computer.  It is BLAZINGLY Fast, normally.  But after installing this, I ran into serious CPU shortages.  I installed tools to help me.  When I realized it was NOT associated with ANY TASK, I realized it started after the new 840 EVO was installed.  I tried a few more things.  Not believing it could be so bad.

Samsung Magician gladly told me my Samsung was OUTPERFORMING my other Crucial SSD...  But  it never felt like that.

Last night I cloned this drive onto a Crucial M550 (1TB).  It took FOREVER (2+hrs...  I went to bed).  That should give you an idea how slow the drive is when you READ FROM IT over time.  (It took under 40 minutes the first time).

Today, I am scoring 7.9 again, and the computer is streaming video and other things without ANY CPU issues.

Me...  Not so much.
3783622
This is my first SSD drive and what a difference compared to a HDD. Speed wise it blows hard drives out of the water! Just wish the price per GB was a bit lower.
2981232
This is a very fast and inexpensive SSD. I'm now spoiled by it and my work computer with its spinning disk feels horribly slow now, even though it has practically the same CPU and RAM as my home machine.

I didn't install the Samsung tools that came with it, assuming that it's better to let the OS do its own management, and not wanting yet another driver loading every time I power on. I made sure to tell my UEFI BIOS that this was an SSD rather than a hard drive so it gets managed properly. Don't forget to do this if your BIOS gives the option!
2683169
First SSD I've ever owned. No issues and it's a hell of a lot faster than the mechanical drives I've always used. For the first SSD I've ever bought, this is a great experience and I highly recommend it.
4611236
At this point, I've probably installed a couple of hundred 120GB SSD's into laptops with failed hard drives, so it's kind of hard for me to feel like one drive is clearly superior to another. At this point, a drive really needs to fail at doing something to make much of an impression, and obviously, that's not a good one. The Toshiba OCZ Trio 150 120GB drive failed to make such an impression, and it's continued to fail to make it since I used it to replace the spinning drive in my old X220 tablet. That's generally a good thing. Replacing traditional hard drives in most laptops is generally a huge performance boost (most laptops use drives that run at 5400 RPM rather than the faster 7200 RPM drives that desktops more typically use), and that's been the case here. You do lose some storage capacity for the price (the drive I replaced was 320GB), but for mobile devices, the performance boost is generally worth the trade-off.

Installation was a breeze and only took a few minutes (this varies greatly from laptop to laptop, but the X220 tablet is one of the easiest ones to change a drive on). The X220 had no issues recognizing the drive and reinstalling Windows via a USB 2.0 flash drive took around 12 minutes, which is a lot faster than it would have been with the original hard drive. Performance is quick and most people will be thrilled.

This is a great SSD for the money. There are cheaper ones out there, some of which are just as good, but this is a solid drive.
3512963
I purchased this SSD to replace a 128GB SSD found in my girlfriends XPS 12 ultrabook, and this is one of the best SSD's I have ever used. Now, as this is a mSATA SSD, installation is a little bit more involved than a traditional SATA SSD, though at least in the case of the XPS 12, I was able to get it running with minimal effort. Further, after installing we were able to get Windows 8.1 installed (via USB) in roughly 15 min.

Out of the box, the drive worked beautifully, and was blazing fast! Further, Samsung comes with their Magician utility, that is a great resource for optimizing the system for an SSD, installing firmware updates, and benchmarking.

Speaking of benchmarking, the results from this drive were:
Sequential Read (MB/s) - 1426 (reported number, but seems unreasonably high)
Sequential Write(MB/s) - 4239 (reported number, but seems unreasonably high)
Random Read (IOPS) - 121089
Random Write(IOPS) - 65149

Further, Samsung magician comes with a RAPID Mode, which allows caching SSD resources in system RAM to improve overall performance, at the cost of free Memory. Be careful with this setting, and only use it if you have an extra gig of RAM at any time to throw towards speed improvements.

In conclusion, the drive works perfectly, is blazing fast, has great utilities, and was reasonably priced. I don't see any reason to not buy this drive if you are looking for an SSD upgrade. That being said, I believe there is an issue with this drive and AMD processors where the drive will dramatically underperform, so I would only consider this drive if you have an Intel processor. In the case of AMD, I have had lots of sucess with the OCZ/Toshiba Vertex and Vector lines of SSD's
1110849
This SSD completely changed my system. My system now boots in under 15 seconds. Programs, games, music, movies, internet browsing is so much quicker and no hiccups. Got a 7.9 WEI score in Windows 7 with this drive. Switched from IDE to AHCI mode and made some other minor tweaks to get the most out of the SSD. This is my first SSD and I must say it is a great purchase. I am one happy customer :) and would highly recommend to anyone considering it. I would love to try these in RAID 0 :D
4626375
Going SSD is similar to going from SD to HD... you cant go back to a standard HDD anymore, it just feels wrong and slow. My tablet has an SSD but not my PC so the chance to upgrade it made me very excited... maybe too excited. But it certainly hasn't disappointed. Load times, boot times are noticeably better. This isn't the cheapest SSD but it has the Samsung and the EVO series name so i think it's worth it.
1585730
I just got this SSD and coming from a 500gb western digital all i have to say is wow. Games, OS and everything just loads right up, no waiting anymore. its amazing! i did a benchmark and i was getting 520mb/s write and 506mb/s read! which i thought was weird since write was always faster than read in all my benches. BUT who cares! 500mb/s whos gonna notice the difference?!?! i don't think ill ever go back to hard drives except for movies and music and stuff. Love this drive and i recommend it to anyone looking to speed up your system! i got the 120GB and i still have 50gb after games and some programs installed. LOVE IT!