Crucial BX500 SATA SSD review: An affordable upgrade drive
At a Glance
Expert’s Rating- ****
Pros -
- Good everyday performance
- Low price per gigabyte
Cons
We recommend this QLC drive in the larger capacities for those that want good everyday performance for a budget price. The smaller capacities will likely run into more slowdowns during heavy writes.
Crucial’s BX500 internal SSD offers a lot of capacity for not so much cash, along with great everyday, real-world performance. Most users will be perfectly happy with this QLC drive, as long as they don’t bang on it too hard—as in writing large amounts of data in a short period of time, or filling the drive to point where it runs out of NAND to treat as cache. At that point, write performance drops to around the hard-drive level.
Performance
Whatever the componentry, the 2TB BX500 is a very good everyday performer. Most users will never run into write slowdowns, at least with the larger capacities. With the 240GB and 480GB drives, which have far less NAND to employ as cache, you might.
All but the best SSDs slow down when NAND cache is gone, with QLC being the slowest when this occurs. Also, the phenomenon will present itself more frequently in all drives as they fill up and there’s less free NAND available for use as cache. That’s why it’s important to overbuy in terms of capacity with the vast majority of SSDs.
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