Please note: I only gave this drive 4 stars for capacity because my other drives range from 3TB to 8TB making this one seem "tiny" by comparison. (That isn't fair, but if a significantly larger SSD were available [8TB or larger] I would give serious consideration to buying one. Hence the rating is relative. Yes, there are some 4TB's available but that's too small for what I'm planning. Sorry WD.)
This is ONLY a preliminary review - I've been using this drive for only a few days and here are my initial points of note.
Now about a year ago I tried replacing the drive containing the root file systim (/ in case you aren't familiar with Linux or Unix) with another, smaller solid state drive, and that was a disaster (the system could not see the drive no matter what I did). i actually tried 2 of them and had the same, useless results with both, so I gave up. However, I decided to give it another try and this time it worked perfectly.
Now my "normal" root file system for this system is on an 8TB drive, but even though it's very fast, sometimes the work load on this machine gets fairly high, does tons of disk I/O, slowing down the entire system (it isn't the CPU - that's an "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5930K CPU @ 3.50GHz" which which runs like lightning on its MSI X99A MB).
So I decided to build a new "root drive" containing only /, /tmp, var, swap, the BIOS boot partition, and the "EFI System Partition." I am using the machine primarily for SW development at this point, but initially it was intended to the the front end of a system monitoring a ridiculously-large network containing well over 2 billion devices (yes it's a major telecom/network carrier). So it has *extremely* fast communications conecivity/capabilities), and consequently it has all the horsepower I need for it's current uses.
The last time I put this box together I installed from the "Server" live disk and then added everything else I needed (Gnome, KDE, development, etc. ad inifintum) later. This time I started with my preferred KDE desktop and went from there.
The entire install of the KDE live system took (IIRC - I've lost my notes) about 20 minutes from begin to end, and after the install (and the post-initial-boot "finish the install") were finished, the machine rebooted almost faster than I can believe.
Now a bit of an aside: During the normal boot process (think /etc/rc.d/rc.local), there are a lot of external checks which used to slow the boot time down to about 3.5 minutes. After swapping to this SSD drive, the boot time is under 45 seconds with the same rc.local contents.
I can't comment on reliablity yet (it's far too soon), and I will be updating this review in a couple of months.
That being said I have noticed one thing that gives me a laugh any time I see it. When I run the command "hddtemp" to check the temperatures of the various hd's on the system, when it gets to this line it prints out:
"/dev/sdc: WDC WD4002FYYZ-01B7CB0: drive is sleeping"
:-)
Oddly enough although the drive is functioning, the system also reports that it's RPM is 0 and that the drive must be sleeping or off-line.
Oh - there is one other thing worth mentioning. While HDDtemp can't measure it's temperature, I did put a contact thermometer on it and it measured it as 71.4 F, the chasis temperature.
As I already said, as soon I have enough experience to write a logic/experience-based review - or of the drive goes belly-up - I'll write an update. In the mean time if you'running Linux/Unix and want to try one of these, I'd say go for it.
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