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We’ve spoken about the Crucial MX500 before, but the short version is this: it’s a fast SATA SSD that also offers great value. Today, it’s even better value than normal in the UK, as Amazon have discounted the gargantuan 2TB size of the drive to just £149.97, a 30% discount from its normal £214 RRP.
Looking at other 2TB SSDs on Amazon, it’s tough to find anything at a better price. Even the relatively cheap and cheerful SanDisk Ultra costs £163, while drives that use cheaper QLC flash memory are the same price – such as the Samsung 870 Qvo, one of Katharine’s best SSD recommendations. The Crucial BX500 is £10 cheaper, at £140 for an equal 2TB size, but this drive lacks a DRAM cache. That makes it a fair bit slower than the MX500 in normal use, especially for sustained writes. All things considered, I’d take the MX500 at its reduced price – hence this post!
The only true competitor is another Crucial drive, the P2. This is an NVMe drive that can hit substantially faster speeds – up to 2400MB/s reads – than the 550MB/s Crucial MX500. However, it does require an NVMe slot, which are typically limited to one or two on most mainstream motherboards, so you may find that adding SATA storage like the MX500 is a little easier. If you do have a free slot though, the P2 is an even better choice than the MX500 given that it’s substantially faster for only a relatively minor premium of £8.
Another interesting option is the Crucial X6, which is also discounted today. It’s £147, around £50 less than it was last week. This drive is discounted often, but could still be a good choice if you often need to bring large files around with you; I use a similar drive to watch 4K videos on my TV. However, for stuff like game storage, you’ll notice load times are a little slower, due to the limitations of the USB interface, so the extra portability definitely comes with a trade-off.
With that, I think we’ve more or less covered all of the reasonable 2TB drive options available. The MX500 or P2 would be my top choices, but pretty much everything I mentioned is pretty reasonable – apart from the SanDisk Ultra, sorry bud.
I hope you found this article useful, and thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more hardware deals throughout this week here at… R! P! S!
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