Grab the solid Crucial MX500 2TB SATA SSD for ?100 from Currys
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, especially if you're changing around storage in a PC that lacks NVMe support. From Currys at the moment, one of the better SATA drives out there, the ever-reliable Crucial MX500 in 2TB form, is down to £100, which is a decent price.
The big thing about the MX500 against a lot of other SSDs at this price point, including Crucial's own remarkably similar BX500, is that it features a DRAM cache. 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. I've replaced the hard drives of aging systems with SATA SSDs like the MX500 before, and it certainly makes a big difference in boot times.
You're also 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. 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 £100, this Crucial MX500 2TB from Currys 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.