Best Solid State Drives

One of the defining aspects of this SSD is Samsung's built-in TurbroWrite technology, which helps maximize the input and output speeds of the device to give performance well beyond what you'll get from many other drives. This technology allows the drive to analyse the location and volume of data and place it in locations on the drive where read and write speeds will be entirely optimized, ensuring that all applications that you run on your system load in record time.

Of course, you can't mention the high performance of this drive without going into its overall durability. SSDs have long been known to have a limit in regard to how many write operations can be performed in a block. But with this drive, you'll find the durability to be well beyond what has been offered in the past. Thanks to the advanced VNAND technology that the drive uses, you get this combination of high performance and durability, with the drive guaranteed to not wear out even after years of heavy use.

Installation of the drive is extremely simple and requires nothing more than what is normal for installing any other SATA HDD or SSD. Once installed, the bundled Samsung Magician software will help you manage the drive by giving you the tools that you need for troubleshooting and maintenance. Overall, you simply won't find a better SSD out there on the market.

Although we noted above that installing the drive may be a bit complicated in some laptops, you will find it a breeze to install in any desktop PC or game console that supports it. Along with its easy physical installation, you will find that every other task that is necessary to perform when installing a new SSD will be as simple as it can possibly get. The drive comes with the Samsung Magician software utility, which gives you some powerful tools for setting up and configuring the drive. This utility gives you the tools for tracking your drive's health, optimizing its performance, and customizing it in any way necessary in order to give you maximum drive performance and efficiency.

When it comes to all other aspects of this SSD, you will find plenty to love with this model. For instance, the drive allows for easy configuration and it is a breeze to use with most data import and export utilities, so you can easily migrate from an old drive to this new one. In a physical sense, the drive is quite light, so it won't add much additional weight to your laptop, nor does it get hot while in use, so you won't have to worry about heat issues cropping up. Overall, this SSD gives every PC and console owner a great way to increase your system's data storage without having to make any sacrifices in the process.

This solid state drive for your desktop computer is a real energy savior: compared to its predecessor, the traditional non-3D WD Blue, this one consumes 25% less energy while performing way better.

The WD Blue 3D NAND internal SSD has been subjected to extensive testing by the company's labs to ensure that it works with basically any system without so much as a glitch. It also comes with the access to download the WD Dashboard, a free monitoring software with all the necessary tools for the drive management, including the Acronis True Image WD Edition that allows cloning the system. There is a catch here, though, and it is that this cloning tool, in particular, seems to only cooperate faultlessly when your regular hard drive is also the model from Western Digital; however, there seems to be no problem with all other tools and the general monitoring of the WD Blue drive.

This is the drive primarily for those wishing to upgrade to better manage their everyday computer-related tasks. It is not a gaming or video editing model, at least not for anything hardcore, but it does offer high quality, endurance, and better-than-nice speeds for just about anything else at a somewhat ridiculous price.

One other concern that many people have about SSDs is the amount of heat that they generate inside of a system. This is definitely a valid concern, as the increase in processor and graphics card speeds has also led to an increase in heat generation, which can severely shorten the lifespan of any system if it is not properly controlled. With this SSD, you won't have to worry about it generating a lot of heat. In fact, the device will barely get warm even with heavy usage, so those who have trouble managing the cooling inside their systems will find this SSD to be an ideal choice.

As far as the physical attributes go for this SSD, they are really no different than what you will find with most other models. One small exception may be the label, which has a cool-looking gold nugget logo along with its sleek silver body, so those who have gaming rigs with transparent shielding will love the look of this drive. Installation is as painless as it is for most other SSDs, with no special drivers needed to install. The drive comes with disk cloning software, but the performance of this software isn't the greatest, so some users may want to opt for their own solutions. Regardless, the overall attributes of this SSD make it a great choice for anyone looking for a combination of reliability and performance.

The MX500 solid state drive offers top-notch data protection in a case of a power loss. The feature was present in the MX series before but now it has been slightly adjusted to enhance the protection quality by reducing power requirements to maintain the signal.

Here's more. While most TCL drives use SLC buffers, the one designed by Crucial here is dynamic instead of fixed. This means its capacity is flexible: it depends on how much data there is on the flash. When the SSD is in its idle period, the technology frees some capacity that will be used when the speed-up time comes. This way, your drive writes data faster and better.

Included with the drive is the Storage Executive software. This is a collection of tools to manage your MX500. In addition to the standard set of tools, there is a tool to up the overprovisioning, i.e. allocate some more space for the controller's background operation. This will result once more in the performance boost of the drive in general.

We've stated this at the beginning of this review but it won't hurt to repeat: the Crucial's MX500 is not the very best among the drives on today's market but its performance exceeds expectations for the devices of its price so the deal is more than nice in the end.