Crucial MX500 500GB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD - CT500MX500SSD1, Blue/Gray

I bought this Crucial MX500 1TB SSD about a year and a half ago, and it’s still marching on without a problem. The drive is 81% full right now with mostly *.mkv videos, and it hasn’t slowed down a bit.Boots are quick, programs open instantly, and everything just feels smooth. Installation was super easy, and I haven’t had to think about it since—exactly what you want from storage.This thing has been a rock-solid upgrade for my system. Definitely one of the best tech purchases I’ve made, and I wouldn’t hesitate to buy another.

Would I recommend this SSD? Yes, I've had it for a little over a month now and I've had no issues. (I bought the 500 GB version and am only talking about the 500 GB version)I would recommend you also check if you want a different similarly priced SSD. (This entire review is talking about the 500 GB versions of each drive as of January 2021)For example:The ADATA SU760 $52.99https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TDW86SQ/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_5?smid=A2UXO5LPTDY3LN&psc=1 (I included a picture of the performance of my brother's drive that he has been using for many months now)The ADATA SU800 $54.99https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01K8A29CS/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_5?smid=A2UXO5LPTDY3LN&psc=1(I don't know anyone who has one, so I can't say how good it is from experience, but the overall star rating is pretty good)The Samsung 860 EVO $54.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0781Z7Y3S/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_voubGb4T4G14K?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 (It's a Samsung drive so it will usually be high quality but it's not always in stock)*If the links don't work I'm not fixing them, just search the name of the drive.Why I bought it (please skip if you do not care):I have a laptop that had a hard drive. The hard drive would blue screen like once a month for a few months before it decided to completely brick itself. It would blue screen about 1 minute after booting. It would still let me boot into safe mode without blue screening but I couldn't use wifi so there was no point. I could no longer write to the drive. I have a HP laptop and since they come with HP hardware diagnostic tools, I was able to determine that the problem was the drive and not something else. I bought this drive just because it was the first one I saw that would arrive the next day. My laptop broke on Friday and I was able to get it working before school on Monday.Instillation (Drive and Windows):Installing the drive was very easy for me because I have a good amount of computer knowledge. This drive and my old hard drive are exactly the same size so all I had to do was remove my old drive. Then I took the vibration cover off the hard drive, this cover also held the drive in place. I put the cover on my SSD and slid it into the drive area. It fit tightly in there just like my old hard drive. After that, I turned on my computer and went to the bios to make sure it would boot off of a usb. I plugged in my window install usb and the computer was able to boot into the windows install manager. I was able to painlessly install and boot into windows 10. My old windows used secure boot but the new windows used legacy boot so I did have to change that in to bios to be able to boot. Since I have an HP laptop my virtual windows license automatically transferred to the fresh install of windows.Performance:I have uploaded 2 pictures of this drive's performance. The performance is as advertised and the differences could be do to a lot of different things. In day to day tasks it is a lot faster and smoother then my old hard drive with 16 gb of optane. Windows boot time is significantly faster. Downloading, transferring, and unzipping files is a lot faster. Being able to use my computer while windows is updating in the background is also nice. For gaming, don't expect a significant improvement in most games. Maybe your load times will be a bit faster but most games just don't really rely on your drive.Overall: This drive has not given me any issues over the month that I have owned it. I highly recommend buying it.

I bought three of these Crucial MX500 4TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD drives to install in a recently acquired HP Core i7 desktop. My goal is to eventually phase out a full tower PC that I built in 2012. It handles my video and audio servers and has a solid state boot drive, along with 7 spinning hard drives for data.This HP has a considerably smaller case and my goal was to fill it with high capacity SSD drives. I've always been a fan of the Crucial line of SSD drives, and I've never had one go bad. All three of these Crucial 4 tb drives were installed to SATA headers on the motherboard, and I was able to fit all of them in what is a one foot tall mini desktop tower.Installing these drives is very easy, plug in a sata cable plus a power cable to each, and they're good to go. I used 3m two sided tape, the kind used to hang pictures, to stick the drives to flat surfaces inside the case. They are very light and compact, I just made sure to keep some air around each drive and not bunch them together.Once they were installed, I closed up the case and turned on the computer. I opened disk manager and partitioned and formatted each of the new drives. They will be used as data drives. The computer came with a 1TB M.2 as the boot drive, so the total solid state drive capacity for the computer is 13 TB.I spent some time copying my audio database of over one thousand CD's ripped into lossless format files, as well as my video database of movies and music videos.My 2012 build full tower with it's spinning hard drives holding the data, worked well for many years. This new one with all ssd drives, works much better. Each audio or video file loads noticeably faster than on the old server, plus there are no spinning hard drives making noise.I downloaded the "Crucial Storage Executive" software from the Crucial website that is very helpful. It checks the firmware revision you have and updates it if needed. All three of mine came with the "45' version of the firmware. I had it update to the latest "46" version which took less than 30 seconds.The photo with this review shows my new media server loaded with 13 tb of solid state drive capacity, including three of the Crucial SATA ssd's. They are fast, cool running and should have a very long life.