Over the years I’ve used and owned several WD hard drives, and have overall been very happy with them. This, however, is the first internal 2.5” hard drive that I got. I’ve only used it for less than a week and it’s too early for me to write any definitive review of its performance (to say the least), but for my intentions and purposes the hard drive has performed as well as one would have hoped for.

Most laptops are very tightly packed and not easy to open, and hence the installation of a new hard drive can be rather tricky. This is especially the case if (as it’s almost always the case) the laptop only has a room for a single hard drive. In that case you will be replacing the old one with the new. That means that you have to either install the operating system and all the files and programs manually from scratch onto your new drive, or, more likely, copy the exact content of your old drive onto the new one. I have done the latter. I have used this drive in order to upgrade my old 2009 Mac Mini (which uses the laptop drive). This is officially a desktop computer, but from the upgrade point of view it is as complicated (if not more so) than your average laptop. In order to copy my hard drive I had used Carbon Copy Cloner and Crico hard drive mount. The whole process took a few hours for my 160 GB hard drive. Once that was accomplished, I took apart my computer, removed the old HDD, and inserted the new one. Then I powered it on, crossed my fingers, and – voila! – had a whole new upgraded hard drive!

I have not noticed any significant improvements in terms of speed with this hard drive. 320 GB is on the low end of the capacity of the hard drives that are available today, and with the rise of solid state drives you have many other options when it comes to speed vs. the capacity (vs. the price). If you are looking for a good hard drive that is not too pricey, and which will extend the useful life of your aging laptop, then this HDD is definitely worth considering. I myself am glad that I got it.