Upgrade your PC with these discounted SATA and NVMe Crucial SSDs

Today might be a good day to upgrade your desktop or laptop with fast solid state storage, as Amazon has discounted two top-tier Crucial drives to their lowest ever prices for today only. The Crucial BX500 is a 2.5-inch SATA drive that serves as a speedy replacement for traditional hard drives and works well in desktops and older laptops. At £40 for a 480GB model it offers excellent value overall at just 8p per gigabyte. Meanwhile, the Crucial P1 is a faster NVMe M.2 SSD, ideal for newer machines, that's been reduced £55 for a 500GB drive, 11p per gigabyte. Each is a cracking deal in its category, so if you're in the market they're definitely worth a look.

The BX500 is a long-time Digital Foundry favourite that actually serves as the basis of some of our test rigs, thanks to its decent performance and very cheap asking price. While the BX500 isn't the fastest SATA SSD on the market, it's still way faster than spinning disk hard drives thanks to its modern flash memory. You can expect read speeds up to 500MB/s and write speeds up to 550MB/s, roughly five times faster than a traditional HDD, plus even faster random access speeds. That results in faster Windows start-up times, up to 60 per cent lower game load times and more snappy performance all-around. This drive can be used on almost any modern PC thanks to its 2.5-inch form factor and SATA connectors, while drawing less power and boasting better reliability than a mechanical drive.

The Crucial P1 is more intended for enthusiasts and content creators, who can really benefit from its increased speed over SATA drives. While SATA drives are restricted to around 550MB/s, the Crucial P1 is rated for up to 2000MB/s read speeds and 1700MB/s write speeds, perfect for handling 4K video footage, and its random read/write speeds are competitive too. We still recommend drives like the £90 ADATA SX8200 Pro and £107 Samsung 970 Evo if you're looking for the flat-out best SSDs for gaming and content creation, but the Crucial P1 is considerably cheaper per gigabyte than these drives thanks to today's offer, while still offering performance in the same ballpark.

Remember that you'll need an NVMe slot on your motherboard or in your laptop to make use of the Crucial P1, as normal SATA M.2 slots aren't compatible with it. If you're not sure, search online for "NVMe SSD" plus the name of your motherboard (or laptop model, if you have one of those). The Crucial BX500, on the other hand, uses a standard SATA data and power connection, which can be found on basically all desktops and many laptops; if you have a laptop then Googling the name of your model and "replace SSD" should provide helpful results. In any case, you can also comment below if you're not sure and we'll help if we can.

Upgrading your computer's storage is one of the easiest and cost-effective upgrades you can make, so if you're tired of running out of disk space or want a more responsive PC, these drives could be just the thing.