Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsCompatibility issues, Beware!!
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2017
I read many reviews before deciding on this product. The reviews I read made upgrading to an SSD easy, but it was not. The physical part was easy, take out the old hard drive, take the old drive out, put the new SSD in and TA-DA, install done. Ahhhh, NO, the battle is about to begin.
The machine I WANTED to install it in didn't like the drive at all, it's a 5-year-old HP. I was able to use load Windows 7 on the drive easy (used ghost image of my old hard drive), thought all was well. Did a shutdown to turned the laptop off. Went back, hit the power button and NOTHING, cursor hangs in the top left-hand corner. Tried a completely different image of the same hard drive, same thing. Then did a clean load of Win7, same thing. Anytime I did a shutdown, it wouldn't boot ever again. Figured it was a BIOS issue, made sure the BIOS was current, it was, so I moved into additional troubleshooting. At this point, I contacted PNY tech support.
Taking the drive out of the HP laptop, I put it on an old Acer desktop and tried again. This time it attempted to boot, got a little further than it did on the much newer laptop. It booted to the point where it said "starting windows", then it reset the hardware.
PNY tech support answered me back within 24 hours but offered little advice or help, in the end, they just said: "it's a bad drive". Two machines down one to go. Moved to my last hope, an old Toshiba A305-S6872. Didn't want to use this one because of memory limitations, has 3gig and can only go up to 4. Naturally, the SSD works on this machine, I can even shut it down and bring it back up to a working machine!
It's in the BIOS folks, something in the BIOS for me at least makes this SSD picky. If you buy this product and it doesn't work right out of the box and you don't have 3 available machines available to test with, put it back in the box and try another brand, PNY tech support is less than helpful.
Bottom line, I'm going to keep the PNY, but I'm not happy that I can use it in the machine of my choice. Good luck and happy troubleshooting!!