WD, or Western Digital, is definitely no slouch in the world of storage. The company has been producing disks since 1986, and enjoys a solid reputation of performance and reliability.

Whether your computer is beginning to act a bit sluggish, or you're simply keen to ensure your new purchase has the best possible start to life, the WD Blue SN580 is a great upgrade.

It's been purpose-built for creators and professionals with a blazing 4,150MB/s read speed. It's compatible with PCIe 4.0 slots and is physically 22mm wide by 80mm long (M.2 2280).

You likely already know that replacing a conventional hard disk drive, HDD, with a solid state drive, SSD, will bring a huge boost to the operational speed of your laptop. It will also add years to its usability. Unlike an HDD, an SSD is faster, more efficient, and less prone to device failure. It uses less power and is quieter and lighter.

However, you can still benefit substantially from replacing your existing SSD. Depending on the specs of your computer, whether desktop or laptop, chances are it has a 128GB, 256GB or 512GB SSD. So, straight away you benefit from increased storage with the cavernous WD Blue SN580 coming in capacities up to 2TB.

And, with a powerful SSD like this, that's been specially crafted to handle the large files and fast access demanded by creators and professionals, you benefit from increased performance all around. That's not only while working on photos, videos, documents, spreadsheets, or what-have-you, but even positively impacts your computer's boot time, and reduces overall system lag. The upshot is a smoother, more responsive user experience. In fact, iTWire has been testing the WD Blue SN580 out and while we generally expected a boost to large file reads and writes, we were pleasantly surprised by how overall smoother everything was.

Additionally, a modern SSD like the WD Blue SN580 uses less power, which means less heat and noise, but also improves your laptop's battery life. Ultimately, it's a win-win.

This is especially true if your existing disk isn't an NVMe model; NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) is a new storage access and transport protocol for flash and next-generation solid-state drives that delivers the highest throughput and fastest response times yet for all types of enterprise workloads. It's pretty much the same size as a stick of RAM! But yet it's an SSD, and your computer will love you for it.

If you've never replaced a disk before it may sound tricky, but it's something that's done untold thousands and thousands of times around the world every day. You'll find many YouTube videos to help guide you. But it comes down to finding your PCIe slot and installing the WD Blue SN580 carefully by lining the pins up and pushing gently but firmly until you hear it click into place.

Now, if you have an existing drive you can either remove it or keep it as a second drive. Be sure to use your BIOS setup to adjust your disk boot order, and check out tools like Clonezilla if you want to clone your existing disk onto the new one.

The WD Blue SN580 NVMe SSD is a tremendous upgrade for your computer, no matter the form factor, make, or model, so long as it can support an NVMe M.2 2280 SSD. Check it out at WD's website here.

Here you can see our own before and after photos, installing the WD Blue SN580 in the incredible Minis Forum UM790 Pro AMD-based computer, greatly expanding our storage capacity.

With the case off, ready to put in place:

and, in place: