Crucial’s rather excellent value SATA DRAM-less QLC SSD, the BX500, is down to £56 on Amazon UK from an RRP of £74. I feel that’s a decent savings on a drive ideal for upgrading an older machine or as media/game storage in a new one, where money spent per gigabyte is the primary measurement of a drive’s suitability. (If performance is the objective, then a faster NVMe SSD drive is the way to go.) And by that measure, this drive is almost off the scale, with a cost of just 5.6p per gigabyte.
Despite being a budget drive, the QLC NAND in the BX500 offers high peak speeds – up to 540MB/s reads and up to 500MB/s writes, which allows it to run right up to the limits of the SATA interface originally designed for hard drives. Its DRAM-less design means that performance dips in sustained read/write scenarios, but if you’re using this for media or game storage, you’ll experience this tech’s limitations less frequently than if you were using the BX500 as your Windows/Linux/macOS install drive.
Looking at the Amazon price graphs, the 1TB BX500 normally costs around £62, so this is around a £6 drop – and a historic low price for this model. Searching online, I can’t find any other drives of a similar spec (and from a reputable manufacturer rather than DestructionDarius2.totallyarealcompany) apart from the Integral V Series at £51 which offers significantly lower specs and was released in 2016, making it relatively ancient. Still, it’s also worth considering.
What do you make the of the BX500 – have you used one, and how do you rate it? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll see you again next week with more PC deals as I discover them! Cheerio.
Will Judd
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