Solid state drives have become cheaper and better over the past decade, and now it's almost a no-brainer to use SSDs in all your PCs. Now you can pick up a Crucial MX500 SSD at a great price.
The MX500 is a SATA-based SSD that has been around for a few years. Crucial promises sequential read speeds of 560 MB/s, and sequential writes of around 510 MB/s, which is close to the physical limit of the SATA 3 connector. For comparison, a normal hard drive is usually around 80-160 MB/s, while more advanced NVMe SSDs are pushing 3,500MB/s read speeds or higher.
Crucial MX500 1TB
This is still one of the best SATA SSDs available, making it a great option for replacing a hard drive in an old PC.
This drive isn't as fast as some of the best internal SSDs, especially any NVMe models, but it is much faster and more reliable than any spinning hard disk. The drive is especially a great choice for upgrading old desktops and laptops, especially ones that don't support M2 or NVMe at all. If a computer's primary drive is still a spinning hard drive, replacing it with an SSD can easily breathe new life into the PC -- speeding up everything from Windows bootup times to app responsiveness.
The Crucial MX500 has dipped below $70 a few times -- it was $66 at Amazon for a few days back in November -- but this is still an excellent deal if you're looking for a SATA drive.