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Mechanical hard disk drives are the still the king of value when it comes to the amount of storage you get for your dollar. But they’re also comparatively slow when up against solid state drives. Even SATA ones like Crucial’s MX500 run circles around HDDs. If the prospect of faster secondary storage at a reasonable price appeals to you, then check out Amazon’s discount on the 1TB version of the MX500—it’s on sale for $81.99.
That’s $18 below its list price, equivalent to an 18% discount. It’s not a ginormous saving, obviously, but the bang-for-buck was already high on this model, and this is the cheapest it has ever been, according to CamelCamelCamel’s price tracking history.
Crucial MX500 1TB SSD | $99.99 $81.99 at Amazon (save $18)
Give your primary storage some breathing room with this 1TB SSD, which makes a fine secondary drive. Or use it as your main drive, depending on your situation—it doesn’t offer PCIe/NVMe-level speeds, but is still much faster than an HDD.View Deal
We still include the MX500 in our roundup of the best SSDs for gaming, even though it is a 2.5-inch SATA model mingling with faster and more convenient M.2 NVMe SSDs. That may seem odd, but there are a few use-case scenarios. Like being out of available M.2 slots on your motherboard, but still wanting to expand your storage.
The best application is to configure it as a secondary drive, which offers faster overflow (compared to an HDD) for your primary drive—your game catalogs aren’t likely shrinking, after all.
However, depending on your situation, you could still use this as your main drive and see benefits, even for gaming. For the most part, games don’t benefit much in going from a SATA SSD to an NVMe SSD, despite the potentially massive speed differential.
That may change when developers begin truly tapping into Microsoft’s DirectStorage API, which allows them to better leverage faster storage. But we’re not really there yet. And as far as Windows goes, it’s zippy on any modern SSD.
The other option is to wait and see what bargains Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring to the table. Those deals are still a couple months away, though, so if you need additional storage now and don’t want to spend a whole lot, this is a decent option.
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