Want a 4TB SSD for £160? Of course you do, you glorious data hoarder! The Crucial MX500 is my go-to SATA SSD recommendation, and it’s now available at this price in an Amazon Black Friday deal.
The MX500 is worth recommending as it uses higher-performance, higher-endurance TLC NAND rather than QLC as you’d normally expect in a budget drive, and it comes with a DRAM cache that keeps performance high, especially in sustained write scenarios.
The MX500’s stats aren’t super exciting in a world of faster NVMe SSDs, but for the sake of completeness you can expet sequential reads up to 560MB/s – the very limit of the SATA interface! – sequential writes up to 510MB/s, while random reads and writes are in the 90-95K ballpark.
If you have the space for an NVMe drive in your PC though, we’d recommend that instead. The 4TB Crucial P3 Plus (£164) uses the PCIe 4.0 M.2 interface and sports speeds up to 5000MB/s, making it significantly faster – though this is a QLC drive without a DRAM cache, meaning that sustained write performance could end up being a bit worse.
Will Judd
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