Crucial BX500 240GB

A budget SSD that won’t be the drive of your life, but you’ll enjoy the journey

The whole point of an SSD, as opposed to a hard drive, is speed. And now that most new desktop PCS come with fast M.2 slots for NVME SSDS that can shift up to 3GB per second, traditional SATA drives like this one (made to fit the same 2.5in drive bays as mechanical drives, and limited to under 600MB per second) may seem like old hat. But, aside from providing the only Ssd-upgrade option for older systems, they now have the potential to offer something a bit different: storage that’s not amazingly fast, but a lot faster than a hard drive, at a reasonable price.

At just 32 quid for the 240GB version we tested, the BX500 certainly won’t break the bank. Even the top 960GB model (near enough a terabyte) can be found for under £125. In our general tests, it comfortably exceeded its claimed maximums of 540Mb/sec for read speeds and 500Mb/sec for write speeds.

This puts it in the same league as pricier SATA SSDS like Samsung’s 860 Evo (£51 for 250GB from www.snipca. com/30539). Like Samsung’s drive, the BX500 could actually write files faster than Windows could throw data at it. In our trickier small-file tests, read and write speeds dropped to 301 and 256Mb/sec respectively, but overall its performance wasn’t far behind even the best SATA drives.

There is one catch: the durability of the BX500 is rated at just 80TBW, meaning the drive could be expected to fail after 80 terabytes of data have been written to it. This figure is halved for the 120GB model, but doesn’t quite double for the 480GB, which is rated 120TBW.

The 860 Evo, for comparison, is guaranteed for 150TBW in the 250GB size and 300TBW in the 500GB. So if you regularly write a lot of data, this may not last as long as rivals, though the rating is only a rough minimum. In light use, you might never see it wear out.

A bargain SSD that’s ideal for breathing new life into older PCS