Grab the excellent Crucial MX500 2TB SATA SSD for just £106 from Amazon
A DF favourite affordable SSD.
It's a well-established fact that SATA SSDs regularly offer some of the best bang for the buck performance if you're looking to upgrade from an older hard drive to a much more reliable and speedier storage solution. Well, here for you today to prove that point even further is a deal from Amazon on a Digital Foundry favourite gaming SSD, the ever-reliable Crucial MX500 in 2TB form, for £106.
You might be thinking to yourself as you read this that I might be repeating myself, given I discussed an especially similar deal a few days ago on the Crucial BX500 from Amazon. Well, there is a key difference between the drives that makes this MX500 an even better deal. The MX500 features a DRAM cache, whereas the BX500 doesn't. In short, this means the drive offers better random performance and is generally more reliable, making it suitable for an OS install as much as just for general storage. This means the MX500 is a better bet if you're going to be using it as a boot drive in an older system that may only have a mechanical hard drive inside.
In terms of speeds, Crucial rates the MX500 as offering sequential read and writes of up to 560MB/s and 510MB/s, respectively. They may not be up there with some of the best NVMe drives we've seen, but it actually maxes out the SATA III interface the MX500 runs on. The real comparison here is to made with more typical mechanical hard drives, which are around six or so times slower than SATA III-capable drives like this MX500, meaning this is going to be a lot snappier when fetching files, booting your OS, or loading up games, for instance.
The fact also remains that you're getting 2TB of storage, which is going to give you a lot of space for an OS install, as well as for a lot of files and applications, too. In doing the maths, it works out that the MX500 is costing you 5.3p per GB, which is some excellent value for money. Moreover, the fact that this is solid state storage and has no moving parts make it inherently more reliable than the older mechanical hard drives you may well be replacing, which is just handy to know for the sake of peace of mind amd ensuring your data is safe.
For £106, this Crucial MX500 2TB from Amazon is an absolute steal, and if you're in need of a capable SATA SSD to use for adding more storage into an existing system or providing a much-needed speed boost to an older one, then this drive should definitely be on your radar.