Intel 530 Solid State Drive Retail Kit 120gb - SSDSC2BW120A4K5

!update 3/3/2016 On the very bottom is the update (pretty important)!Looking for vital information, below my experience review you'll probably find what you want.So I bought this since I was tired of having my OS on a Terrabyte hard drive and I wanted my OS to be isolated from everything else so it won't be affected. i went to install my OS windows 8.1, on a normaly on a HDD it takes around 1hr and 30 min to 2hrs. With this SSD it took less than 30 minutes to install heck not even 20. Orginally with my HDD it took 30 sec to 1 min for my PC to boot up. now it's less than 10 SECONDS!!! Take note I have a Intel core i3 3.5GHz along with 32GB. Considering I'm a college student and in the field of Computer Software Engineering/cyber security I want to make sure I've got enough ram and a decent processor to handle everything. Along with the solid state came a sticker with the words SPEED DEMON, and I have to say, it looks beautiful on my pc.Now to get to the important stuff.-If you want to make sure you can put it into your Tower PC you'll need the reseller kit as it comes with an extention for fit a 3.5 HDD slot/tray (screws included) or a black plastic add on for your Laptop (I'd recommend getting a larger SSD for a laptop so you have something to work with instead of constant worry over storage space.) It also comes with a SATA cable and a power supply cable.-Now some places it says that you need to do a few things in order to use a SSD. This is not the case, I simply hooked it up and installed my OS without any issues at all. (no there is no Driver and the disk that comes with the kit is only a bunch of manuals and warranty which you don't need to register it)-This Intel 530 SSD 120GB is most certainly large enough for an Operating System like Windows 7,8,8.1 and so on. I even have all my drivers (motherboard and graphics card) installed along with McAfee, Microsoft Office 2013, Google Chrome, Printer Driver and with it all up to date (with a lot more programs that come with windows 8.1) I still have 62.1 Gb left on it.*Size was my ultimate worry when it came to purchasing this product, which is why I am having this up for those with worry about storage space. you have enough space for essentials but I can't say you have enough for games.*-Note that you can make a SSD faster with TRIM but not having TRIM turned on will NOT affect an SSD, it'll just allow it perform better when uninstalling and reinstalling. I can't say this is something to worry about when it comes to something of this size since 120GB is not really enough space for gamers. Are there any cons with TRIM active, I wouldn't know since I'm not planning on using it since I have an OS on mine. I don't want to chance it.If you're asking, "Is buying this really worth the money I mean, it's seriously expensive?"Yes it's expensive but for the fact that it uses less electricity, runs faster, can take many more hits (falling on the ground or hammerd hits) than an HDD but the best part of all of these features, with Intel you get a 5 YEAR WARRANTY!!! 5 YEARS, just having that is worth the money.In short I am pleased with this product. It works very nicely. If you come up with issues then you had bad luck. Take note I'm reviewing this as a BRAND NEW product straight from Intel through amazon. Hope this review helps.!update!So it's been a little over a year now and my pc is still running at blazing fast speeds. after a year of having it I still have 38.1 GB (why below) left on it. I will probably be upgrading it soon though, you don't want to have too much on a SSD or any storage device other wise it'll have some issues and potentially crash. Other than that I'm still running just fine, to think I have 4 years of warranty left on this thing.I would like to point out the 16.5 of the data is due to my OneDrive automatically downloading and writing to it. I would advice disabling this feature on an SSD because it can shorten the life of it. I don't know if you can change the drive to download and write too but this should be something you should be aware of.

This was my first SSD, so wasn't quite sure what to expect. I went with Intel as I've always had good luck with their other components. So, I cloned my old spinning platter drive to this one, and all worked fine on the first try. This is the most performance gain for the money of any changes I've ever made to my computer. Of course it won't change a Pentium 4 into an i7, but you will see a noticeable difference. Now for some details that may help others...I highly recommend buying the retail kit for the few extra dollars. The Intel SSD Toolbox software that comes with it is really nice as it keeps track of the usage and gives an estimated life remaining. It also tweaks your system for best performance. A couple of notes though, it appears to have changed my display monitor's sleep setting to 20 minutes. I thought the system had died the first time it happened as I originally had the monitor set to never sleep since I use the system nearly all the time. I simply changed it back to never sleep and all is well. The kit also has a mounting bracket (for Desktops) and a nice plastic shim (for Laptops) and some cables in case you need them.Included in their software is an Optimizer that's recommended to run each week. I'm not sure what it does, but figure Intel knows what's best, so I'll do what they say. Another item worth mentioning, when running the Optimizer it will sit at 85% for quite a while and then finish. You might think the system is locked-up, but it will eventually finish after a minute or two.So, about performance... I am very happy with the speed increase. My Windows Experience Index went from 5.9 to 7.7. Applications such as Nero, MS Word and Streets and Trips open in less than half the time now. My e-mail compacting is lightning fast as well. My boot time is much less and smoother. This drive also solved a known Windows 7 annoyance of the tray icons not always appearing due to Win 7 not giving enough time for the apps to finish loading one icon before moving onto the next one. Another user said that an SSD solved this for him, so kudos to him for pointing this out, it fixed mine as well.So in summary, performance is a no-brainer. I just hope the life expectancy is at least a couple of years and that the Intel SSD Toolkit will let me know when it's getting close to time for a replacement.Would I recommend this to others, well of course. In fact I just bought a 2nd one.