The Crucial MX500 has long been one of our favourite budget SATA drives here at RPS, offering great read and write speeds for usually a lot less than our current SATA champion in our best SSDs for gaming list, the Samsung 860 Evo. Indeed, today’s deal on the 1TB model of the MX500 strengthens that position even further, as its new all-time low price of £67 makes it quite a bit cheaper than its £100 Samsung rival. At this price, it’s well worth snapping up. Previously, falling prices of faster NVMe drives such as the crazy good value WD Blue SN550 have meant budget SATA drives like the MX500 haven’t been particualrly good buys in recent months, especially when the Blue SN550 has been hovering around a similar £90 price point as the 1TB MX500. Indeed, this similarity in price is partly why I took the MX500 off our best SSD for gaming list recently, as it just wasn’t a good budget buy any more when the SN550 offered faster speeds for the same amount of money. At £67, however, this 1TB SATA drive is a proper bargain for those after a lot of storage on the cheap. Indeed, the 1TB Blue SN550 is still £88 at time of writing, and has only ever dropped to a low of £80 in the past year, putting a good bit of distance between it and the MX500. The only downside of opting for a SATA drive these days is that it probably won’t be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s upcoming DirectStorage tech, which aims to cut down on game loading times when it launches later this year. So far, DirectStorage has only been confirmed for PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 NVMe drives at time of writing, but we still don’t know how many games are going to support DirectStorage when it launches, or whether SATA drives will be able to make use of it either. I’d imagine it will be an NVMe-only kind of deal judging by what we currently know about it, but as long as you’re happy with missing out on that for some of the games you planned to have installed on your PC, then this MX500 deal is still definitely worth snapping up.
