Tech Data Corporation Team Group GX2 512GB Serial ATA III 2.5"

It does what you need it to

Nice, well built, and fast. Looks nice and clean, does what it is supposed to. I always look to buy TeamGroup SSDs because they have the best value in my opinion.

Great for upgrading my computer. Load times are much faster.

It was simple to get the new hard drive installed and formatted. I tried to clone my old drive several times with no success. I ended up manually reinstalling the system and all my programs. After all the work it's fast and silent. I like it!

I've purchased a total of 16 of these drives. I've had one fail on me after about 2 months and have not sent it for RMA. Teamgroup's RMA procedure on the website says I would need to pay to ship it to Taiwan and pay all customs / duties fees for shipping both ways, but they would pay the return shipping to me. Considering the low cost of the drive and the required amount of time this would take for international shipping, the cost of the international shipping, and the cost of the additional fees I would need to pay, I have waited and I am still debating if I want to deal with that and if it's even worth it since I've been so disappointed with these drives. I've bought various other items from Teamgroup and so far have been happy with all except these drives and Teamgroup's RMA policy. These drives worked well enough for basic single drive operation in a laptop/desktop as long as there was not any large amounts of data written to the drive. After the small internal cache of the drive is filled, they start to write data at ~15-25 MB/s. This is about 10% the performance of a traditional hard drive and about 5% of the performance of the drive before its internal cache is full. Using them in a RAID setup still cannot offset this poor performance. Even with 16 of these drives in a RAID0, they will still drop write rates to around 150-200 MB/s after the cache fills and will typically drop even lower to around 30-50 MB/s for large files (~5GB+). In comparison, a single 8TB traditional hard drive can sustain 180-220 MB/s for the entire file copy. For example, to copy 6.32TB of data over a 10Gb LAN from NVME drives, it took ~35hrs with these drives in a 16 drive RAID0 setup and ~10hrs to copy the same data to a single 8TB traditional hard drive. This is an average rate of ~180 MB/s for the 8TB HDD and ~53 MB/s for 16 of these drives in a RAID0. Setting these drives in other RAID setups was even worse: JBOD (spanned) = ~17 MB/s; RAID5 = ~29 MB/s; RAID6 = ~27 MB/s; RAID10 = ~32 MB/s. While the write speeds are very annoying if planning to write large amounts of data to these drives, it is the read speeds for large amounts of data that is why I am so disappointed. These drives could burst data at high rates and using synthetic benchmarks show very good read speeds in a 16 drive RAID0 setup, but under actual usage, they cannot maintain those speeds for very long and drop to very slow rates as well. The drop in read speeds isn't as significant as the write rates, but it is still an issue. Reading the same 6.32TB of data that was used in my write tests, these drives would average ~220 MB/s. This is much better than the write average, but still only slightly better than a single traditional HDD. Even short bursts are about the same speed when tested using random files. The synthetic benchmarks show read speeds of 4-5 GB/s, but it appears that's because the test file used in these benchmarks easily fit into the drives' cache and is read from there during the benchmark tests. However, when testing using random files from the array, the read rate is much slower and mostly in the ~180-250 MB/s range. In summary, if you are looking for an affordable SSD for use in a laptop/desktop or as a boot drive for a server, these drives should be fine, but if you are looking to use these for a NAS or a server, keep looking and avoid these drives. I will note that some of my tests were done using only 15 of these drives in the various RAID setups as one of them failed. I also no longer use these drives and they are just sitting around. My use for these drives was at first for main NAS storage and that was downgraded to use as a backup for my main NAS and now nothing, because using two traditional HDDs in RAID1 for backup is faster than using 15 of these, even if used in RAID0 with no redundancy.