[SOLVED] Most recommended SATA SSD by the Tom's Hardware community

Nov 8, 2019
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Dear Community,

I am looking for a reasonable choice for a SATA SSD as an upgrade for my older laptop which is not as responsive as it used to be because the old HDD is running at 100% most of the time even if I am not interacting with it. I would appreciate if you could spend a minute to vote in the poll above to let me know of your opinion on which is the best option from the list. Thank you in advance. By the way, I am posting this as an addition to my older thread as I just found out that you are able to create polls and since the post has been updated a few days ago, it will probably be overlooked. I would appreciate if you could make a vote as I will be buying the one which gets the most votes. Here is the link to my previous post if interested: https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...p-by-adding-a-sata-solid-state-drive.3542863/
 
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Solution
All ssds draw an insignificant amount of power. Far less than a cell phone even.

SSD marketing is all misleading at best. Q depths and too many numbers.

Currently, I feel the MX500 is the best offering. It offers 860 evo performance for similar money to the cheaper drives.

Can't go wrong with any of the drives above, however.
Nov 8, 2019
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Added a choice in there...;)

I have 3 out of the 4 choices.
Flip a coin, or whichever is cheaper in your market.

Thanks mate. Currently, the first 3 disks cost around the same +- £5 and then there is the Samsung EVO 860 250GB one which costs the same as the 500GB variants of the other 3 listed above. I would probably go with 500GB one anyway, as the 250GB variants are around £40 and the 500GB variants are just £10 to £15 more. People told me that it is not worth going for Samsung when planning to add it to a laptop as then the CPU will become the limiting factor and I would rather have double the capacity, so I am kind of crossing the Samsung out from the list. And when it comes to the other 3 disks, WD bought SanDisk in 2016 so those disks should be the exact same and I have not heard about Crucial much. Do you have anyting to add?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
250GB 860 is near the same price as a 500GB MX500?
Unusual. More...but not that much more.

Anyway, I have at least one of those except for the WD Blue.

Flip a coin, or whichever is cheaper.
Performance is basically identical across all 4.
 

Encryption+

Upstanding
Sep 26, 2019
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I like the Samsung drives since while their performance is the same I feel they last a bit longer. This is just my opinion and there's no hard evidence saying this is necessarily true. In the end all of them are good drives, so get whichever one you like best.
 
Nov 8, 2019
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The Crucial MX500 500GB variant is £57 and the Samsung Evo 860 250GB is £49 and apparently it is on sale from £72. At least that is according to Amazon. I was also thinking about waiting until Black Friday but I doubt there will be any massive price drops on SSDs. And anyway, I need it for college, so I am might as well order it as soon as possible. As you said they have pretty much the same performance and they all use the same 3D technology, so I also do not think there is a wrong choice I could make.

I do not know whether people are scared to click on this post after reading the title or whether there just is not that many people at this time but I would expect a few more responses by this time. Hmm.

Just out of curiosity. Since you own so many drives, did you ever need to swap your boot drive and put it into a new device? Would that be possible or not, due to driver issues or something else?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Just out of curiosity. Since you own so many drives, did you ever need to swap your boot drive and put it into a new device? Would that be possible or not, due to driver issues or something else?
You do NOT trivially swap around the drive with the OS on it between systems.
Anyone who says "just do it, it always works" simply has not seen it fail catastrophically.

It might work, it might fail.
Each set of hardware needs its own clean install.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I do not know whether people are scared to click on this post after reading the title or whether there just is not that many people at this time but I would expect a few more responses by this time. Hmm.
It's only been up for an hour.

As far as prices? This is a weird time of year.
Next week, that 860 may be on sale. Or not.
Or the SanDisk. Or not.

Prices change hourly.
 
The MX500 is about as fast as Samsung's excellent 860 EVO, but, usually $30-$35 less expensive in 500 GB variants, and about $60 less in 1 TB sizes.

If it were possible to find the Samsung EVO at MX500 prices, I'd get it. (But, I've used the MX500 in a large hundful of upgrades in lieu of the more expensive EVO, and, was quite equally happy with the MX500's delivered 560 MB/sec sequential reads on CrystalDiskMark...
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
The MX500 is about as fast as Samsung's excellent 860 EVO, but, usually $30-$35 less expensive in 500 GB variants, and about $60 less in 1 TB sizes.
Current prices at Amazon (11 Nov 2019)
860 EVO
250GB - $50
500 GB- $80
1TB - $139

MX500
250GB - $48
500GB - $65
1TB - $108

At Newegg, similar:
860 EVO
250GB - $55
500GB - $80
1TB - $139

MX500
250GB - $45
500GB - $65
1TB - $108
 
My own Amazon options showed $91 min sale price for 500 GB in 860 EVO guise, but, I do see someone with a sale price at ostensibly only $79.99...which would indeed be a great price...., if new....and legit, etc..

As most modern mainboards have M.2 NVME, the Intel 660P is often even a better deal than even the MX500...(but, I choose the 2.5" MX500 now for every laptop 'SATA only' upgrade these days, but, if someone else wants to spend extra for the Samsung, it is an excellent drive of course.
 
Nov 8, 2019
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Anyway, which one is the most power efficient drive? Are there any differences between SSDs? Probably none, but it could be a simple way to decide which one I should go for. However, finding any information other than the read and write speeds of an SSD is a bit of a challenge as if the only selling point are the sequential r/w speeds.
 
All ssds draw an insignificant amount of power. Far less than a cell phone even.

SSD marketing is all misleading at best. Q depths and too many numbers.

Currently, I feel the MX500 is the best offering. It offers 860 evo performance for similar money to the cheaper drives.

Can't go wrong with any of the drives above, however.
 
Solution

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
My own Amazon options showed $91 min sale price for 500 GB in 860 EVO guise, but, I do see someone with a sale price at ostensibly only $79.99...which would indeed be a great price...., if new....and legit, etc..
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0781Z7Y3S
0qJr65C.png
 
Nov 8, 2019
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I was also thinking about upgrading my current SSD in my computer for a bigger capacity Samsung SSD and putting the other one in my laptop, but I do not think it would be worth the hassle. And at the end, I would not see much of an improvement, however, I would have more storage which I probably would not use up anyway as I store a large portion of data on my secondary HDD as well as on external drives. In the future, I would be looking to go with an NVMe drive even though it is not necessary for me to reduce the boot time from few seconds to even fewer seconds, but it looks cleaner not having those cables around. So, in the end, I went with the Crucial MX500 500GB as it had the most recommendations and it was priced well enough to persuade me. Thank you guys for all the help.