Please see UPDATE 2 for more details on the sequential read speeds. UPDATE 1 is based on an erroneous benchmark. This is my first experience with an SSD and I must say that I'm quite pleased so far. I wanted a second storage device for my ThinkPad T420 on which to run Linux and wanted to try an SSD, but didn't want it to be too expensive. After reading some reviews I decided to go with this one; it seemed good for its price. I also did some research beforehand on how Linux and SSDs interact. The distribution I selected was SparkyLinux 4.0, which is a Debian testing derivative. I mounted the SSD via the T420's UltraBay, using a third-party caddy. This was extremely easy and was done in about a minute. During installation, I put the /var and /tmp partitions on the laptop's internal HDD, since these directories tend to get written to frequently. After the initial install, I set the swappiness to 1 and enabled trim manually by editing /etc/fstab, adding the discard and noatime options. These steps were all taken in an effort to reduce wear on the SSD. To further reduce wear, I also installed profile-sync-daemon. I should mention that SparkyLinux does not appear to have hibernate functionality installed by default; I had to actually install the hibernate command before it would hibernate properly. Once everything was set up, it was off to the races. The computer boots up in less than 10 seconds and application launch times are considerably faster than with any HDD I've seen. I haven't conducted any benchmarks, but given the low price and the stance of other reviews, I can't imagine that it's winning any records. Still, it seems to be a great budget option and I'm very pleased with it thus far. It gets 5 stars because it's super cheap and is tangibly much faster than an HDD; any complaints have to be measured against its price. I am now considering getting another one for a different laptop and will update this review if I have any issues down the road. UPDATE 1 (10-09-2015): I finally did some benchmarking and as it turns out, the drive only exhibits a sequential read of ~290 MB/sec, which isn't even close to the advertised 520. This is a bit disappointing, but I don't care too much as it's still plenty fast enough to meet my requirements. Although my requirements are not high, the lower-than-advertised sequential read is probably information that people will want to know, so I'm mentioning it. Right now, I'm not sure if the drive's a lemon or if something else is slowing it down. I've heard some claims that that the T420's UltraBay doesn't reach SATA III speeds, and it's also possible that the caddy I'm using is the bottleneck. A final possibility is that it's a driver issue in SparkyLinux. Since I need to do more research on this matter and I'm still satisfied with the drive, I'm not changing my rating yet. Cached reads, incidentally, are ~4500 MB/sec. UPDATE 2 (10-09-2015): I decided to use a different software benchmark to test the drive's read performance and it reports that in fact, the sequential read performance is ~510 MB/sec. It's good to know that it was a software issue that produced the previous result. Of course, no drive ever actually hits its advertised performance, but this drive comes very close and I don't think anyone will feel cheated. UPDATE 3 (10-10-2015): Ordered a second one for the aforementioned different laptop, a ThinkPad X131e, and dropped SparkyLinux on it as well. I used the same adjustments as before to reduce wear. Once again, the sequential read is ~510 MB/sec, so that's 2 for 2 good drives now. Whatever SanDisk is doing here, it seems to be working. The performance gains are significant for this slow computer. Boot time has been cut in half, programs start up quickly if not instantly, and hibernating went from agonizingly slow to completely tolerable. It's still slower than the T420 - obviously, the SSD can't fix its underpowered CPU - but it's not a laggy mess anymore and honestly, that's all I needed.