acer SA100 240GB 2.5 Inch SSD SATA III Internal SSD Solid State Drive, 549MB/s Read, 3D NAND Flash Memory, SATA III 6 GB/s Interface

(NOTE: THIS DRIVE APPEARS TO START OFF COMPLETELY BLANK, UNRECOGNIZED BY COMPUTER, WITH NO APPARENT COPIES OF WINDOWS TO BOOT WITH OR ANYTHING TO START WITH)(You may need to google a guide to get it set up I think, but it's a extremely powerful SSD once set up!)( I used https://www.softwarepro.org/blog/how-do-i-format-an-unallocated-ssd/#m1 ){As of this review, i have just barely set it up, but i plan to update it later if i run into any issues or updates and give a update a week or month later to make sure no issues occur!}For my computer's setup with a 2nd drive ( I still had my ssd to boot windows. If you have only 1 drive, and install a blank without windows, you will probably need to follow entirely seperate instructions for that. These instructions are what i used to set up my 2 drive computer.)1. On Windows 10, Press Windows Button + X to open up a navigation menu. You should see a Disk Management section on Windows 10, Select it.2. You will need to set up your new drive. I Had a 960 GB new drive, displaying a black unallocated setting. I selected it.{Disclaimer: Be very careful with this. Setting up the wrong drive can wipe all data or ruin a drive, so MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT DRIVE SELECTED!! These are just the instructions i used to set up my own only on a 2 drive computer replacing a dead 1 tb hdd with this 960 GB tb ssd. Yours may be different. }3. Find your new drive, [It should say something like 'Disk0' or 'Disk1' at the bottom of the screen. Make sure the GB matches your blank drive. On mine, the new drive showed up as a Blank drive showing the 960 GB and listing a black "Unallocated" text. Any blue should be a working drive. I set up my black unallocated Drive.Here, you should see a option for MBR (Master Boot Record)And GPT ( GUID Partition table){Unless you're on a extremely OLD machine (Like 10-20 years or older), i think you're supposed to use GPT for most modern computers. It's supposed to offer more corruption protection, efficentcy, and be a better more recent format. I think MBR is for really old computers that were only able to boot off it. }4. Next, i selected Choose the “New Simple Volume” from the context menu {On this new black unallocated drive} to run a "New Simple Volume Wizard". Then, i clicked on the Next button. This began to set up my drive5. Next it brings up a menu to "Enter the size of a new volume or chose the default value. Hit on the Next button.". {I just clicked the default settings, i don't think you should mess with this.}6. Next, I had to set up a default Letter to use for the Drive. You can use whatever you want. But i used F since C was my main drive, D (The dead drive) linked to old dead folders, E was my USB folder, and F was the next unused letter. {You can set it up to whatever you want though.}7. You should see a "Format Partition" menu with "Format the Volume with the Following Settings" option with default settings. I just Selected the defaults without changing anything.8. After clicking on the correct parameters i pressed click on the “Next” button.9. Finally, i clicked on the “Finish” button to format the unallocated space on the drive.Step 10: Profit! My Drive was set up and working on my 2 drive system. I set up some new basic folders like DocumentsF and ProgramsF to save my new stuff. Tested a few test files, did a boot and everything seemed to be working! {It did disconnect once, but it seemed to work the next boot. }After that, my computer seemed finally set up, i was able to see files, use the computer on a 2 drive system. (If you use only 1 drive, i think you might need a way to get the computer booting or back up your old files to the new drive, you probably might need to find a specific guide for that. I still had windows on my old drive to set the new drive up.)Immediately i started noticing a massive speed increase even on stuff i never noticed. My downloads went from 7 mb/s to 20 mb/s on 100 mb/s internet, tripling in download speed from my old hdd (I had no idea downloads were write speed capped!)The internet ran much faster. (I also installed and upgraded 8 gb to 16 gb of ram while i was opening the computer). And the performance increase was great!My only remorse is my old Hard drive went down with some personal files and character arts of some online characters i owned that were almost lost for good. I managed to backup some images to a flash drive before it ended.==== Miscellaneous notes!}As for mentions of the Sata cable. Since i was replacing a internal broken 1 tb hdd of my Acer Nspire, i was able to just use my pre-existing cable inside the laptop to hook up the new ssd. If you only have 1 drive though, it might be a good idea to find out what you need to do on 1 drive.I think it's VERY LIKELY IF YOU ONLY HAVE 1 DRIVE as a blank without windows it probably might not even boot without a usb or cd to boot from(?).{If you only have 1 drive, you should probably google specific instructions for that, you might need to set up and copy your old drive before it fails. It's probably better sooner than sorry after the 3-5 year point. Apparently hard drives tend to be good for 3-5 years before failing, and mine disconnected once before working again before completely losing all data after 5 years.{BACK anything important UP ASAP BEFORE YOU LOSE IT ALL if it's starting to corrupt!. Solid state drives are supposed to be good for like 5-10 years before failing. }== Summary ==Anyways, for what it's worth, this drive arrives COMPLETELY blank, no data, no windows, not even recognized by default on a Acer machine, nada. But once set up, it seems extremely powerful runs well, and gives powerful performance increases.There's lots of reviews of people adding the drive and not having it work. I admit i had to spend nearly 1-3 hours taking my computer out, and spending 1-2 hours figuring out how to get the ssd working. I thought i'd share what worked for me since i was only able to figure out how to fix my Acer Aspire Model: vn7-571g computer from someone who did the same 5 years ago.It seems like a wonderful drive, it's just complicated to set up and seems like it might not work out of the box for windows 10, but if you do, it seems really powerful for the price and 75$ for a 1 tb ssd is a bargain!

I bought this SATA SSD as I recently purchased an Acer Aspire 5 A515-56-32DK Slim Laptop for my wife, but she found the 128 GB of storage too small for all her pictures and videos. I purchased this Acer SA100 960GB SATA III 2.5 Inch Internal SSD to give her over a 1TB of combined storage space. Acer conveniently has an unused extra internal bay and includes pre-installed connectors to the main board making installation very easy. If it’s your first time, like me, don’t worry, it’s really pretty easy. Find some of the good videos that are out there and follow along. There are, however, a few things you need to know. The enclosed documentation is of no value for installation, which makes sense as this drive can be used in multiple devices so they couldn't possibly cover them all. Apparently, there are a few different ways Acer set up the extra bay that may not exactly match the videos you might find. For example, you want to disconnect the battery first thing after getting the back off the laptop. The connector type shown in one of the videos did not exactly match the connector on my laptop, but I was able to figure it out. Additionally, the videos showed that you had to connect the cable to the main board and the other to an additional connector and attach it to the SATA drive. In my laptop, the cable was already connected to the main board, and the connector for the SATA drive was already on the other end, so all I had to do was push the connector into the SATA drive and mount it. The connector only attaches one way, so look at the connector and it will be obvious how it had to be oriented to fully engage to the drive. It comes with 4 screws to mount the drive to the bracket and you use the screws you took out to remove the bracket to put it back in. It will only mount one way, so be careful to reinstall it with the same orientation it was when you removed it.One other issue I ran into was that videos said as soon as it’s powered up, it will recognize the new drive and it will be available, or, it never mentioned first power up at all. At first, I thought I had incorrectly installed the drive, or something was defective, so I called a PC expert friend, and he told me I needed to go to “Computer Management”, then “Disk Management” to initialize the drive. I did that, saw the new drive as “Disk 0”. I right clicked on the drive, selected “New simple Volume” and followed the prompts to name the drive volume.(see pictures). I now see the new drive in File Explorer and it works fine and my wife can store about 41,000 pictures on her new laptop.

I replaced an HDD for this SSD and the result was fantastic. If I new it would work like that, I would have that replaced 2 years ago. The computer starts and log in with less than 20sec

My original drive was failing, bought this as a replacement. Price was reasonable, installed easily into the laptop and so far I am happy with its performance.

Not Ideal, but not bad. Read full review to grasp the situation, not only the first sentence.Inicial thoughtsWell usually I expect close to 500 speed on good SSDs and somewhat 420-ish on the Lower side. but 350 is maximum i get, and 280 is the lowest.We know all Drives drop their speed at some point, when it is half full, or 80% full and etc. minimum speed dropped to 120-ish on 80% full. Read speed, however, is consistent, for example you want to use this as steam drive or something, it will work fine as you only need read speeds.on real time environment, while moving files speeds are fluctuating. Average speed is around 320-ish, while in some cases drops to 280 and goins up to 400-ish.Final conclusion - not bad, but not too good either. For example, this drive would be good for software, games (steam drive) and in workflow. But not reccomend this drive as main OS drive.