Crucial BX500 SATA SSD 1TB, 2.5", Up to 540MB/s, Laptop and Desktop (PC) Compatible, 3D NAND, Dynamic Write Acceleration, Internal Solid State Drive - CT1000BX500SSD101

Excellent SSD, perfect for CCTV use. I installed this 1TB SSD in my CCTV base unit and it works flawlessly. Installation was very easy, it fit perfectly and was recognised straight away without any issues. It has been very reliable so far, running smoothly with stable performance. The price was reasonable for the quality, and it does exactly what I needed it to do. Also a perfect combination for the Eufy HomeBase CCTV hub – fits perfectly and works perfectly. Great upgrade if you need dependable storage for security recordings. Very satisfied with the purchase and would definitely recommend.

I installed this Crucial BX500 1TB SSD into an ageing laptop, and the difference was immediate. Boot times dropped massively, and everything from opening apps to general browsing feels far more responsive. Installation was straightforward — it’s a standard 2.5" SATA drive, so it fit easily and was recognised straight away by the system. No fuss, no extra configuration needed beyond a basic Windows install. For everyday use, performance is very solid. The advertised speeds are close enough in real-world tasks, especially when compared to a traditional hard drive. Everything feels snappier, and even larger file transfers are much more manageable. The 1TB capacity is also a big plus. It gives plenty of space for documents, games, and media without constantly worrying about storage. That said, it’s worth noting this isn’t a high-end NVMe drive. If you’re expecting top-tier sustained write speeds for heavy workloads, this isn’t aimed at that. It can slow down a bit under very large continuous transfers, but for general use it’s more than capable. Overall, it’s one of the best value upgrades you can make for an older PC or laptop. Reliable, simple to install, and makes a noticeable difference in day-to-day performance.

I have owned various PCs in the last 20 years or so and they all had old school mechanical HDDs, and to be honest I never really had many issues with them. All my PCs were either from before SSDs existed or were from when they were still quite expensive and generally came in smaller capacities (my current rig is around 6 or so years old). As I cannot afford to upgrade right now or ideally build my own, I decided to make some tweaks to my existing rig as it is still fairly decent for its age. I upgraded ram a couple of years ago (2x16gb sticks) and last week upgraded from the stock cooler to a much beefier Be Quiet cooler as the CPU was really getting hot under heavy load. While I was at it I thought it was time to finally go over to an SSD seeing as they now have much better capacity for not a lot of money. I decided to go for Crucial as I have always had good experience with them. My PC ram is Crucial and so is the M.2 SSD in my PS5. I felt this had the specs that suited me and as I say, price wise, it was pretty damn cheap. Sadly due to my board being slightly older and being a micro ATX I don't have an M.2 slot, so SATA was the only way to go. I did make one error though as I assumed it would come with a SATA cable, but of course we know what you do if you "assume" anything. It was a simple enough solution, order a cable from Amazon and just fit the drive a day later than planned (I only mention this as I am sure there are others as naive as me who will get caught out too). It was very simple to fit as well. Plugged the SATA cable into the drive and the motherboard and found a spare power plug coming from the power supply that fitted as well and then it was time to test things out. Booted the PC up and while it did take a while to boot (remember this is still booting to my old drive) which is quite normal when installing new parts, but booted as normal. I then opened Acronis True Image (go to the website on the SSD instructions and download the file) and followed the onscreen prompts to clone my old HDD to my new SSD. I had deleted all my music from the HDD before starting this as it took up over 400gb and I felt that would just slow the cloning process down. Even with another 400+ storage still on the drive, it only took about 2 hours to do a full copy. After it was finished I rebooted the PC, went into bios and assigned the SSD as my new boot drive. The PC then booted to Windows so much faster than it normally does and programs loads almost instantly rather than the delayed response of yore. Even web browsers and internet tabs load faster. I also noticed that after the PC logs into Windows I can access programs straight away rather than waiting for Windows to do all its stuff before being allowed to access anything. Seriously loving this piece of kit. The way it works is perfect for me, and is going to make using my PC so much of a better experience than it has been. Factor in the easy installation and the free no issues cloning software, and I think I got an absolute bargain at less than £40. Oh, and I kept the old HDD in the rig but formatted it to use just as storage for my music which I have already reinstalled. Only one program had an issue, with my copy of Photoshop saying the licence was not on it, but that was easily rectifiable, and every other program seems to have carried the licences over.

Well it was only £39.95, so really good price for a 1TB SSD, and I only needed it as a 3rd emergency backup store of family photos, which is going to sit in a drawer in its enclosure for most of the time. But the following is for those of you interested in it's performance. Comparing this SSD to an admittedly much more expensive Samsung EVO 870, is like comparing an SSD to a memory stick for large write jobs. The read speeds weren't bad, running it in a tried and tested enclosure on USB3.1, around a constant 400mbps, but constant write speeds can only be described as awful. I needed to transfer 505GB of family photos and videos to it, and at first things didn't look too bad with speeds of around 350mbps. But after a minute this dropped to around 60mbps or less, stayed there for around 30 secs, then went up to 325mbps for a few secs, then down to maybe 70mbps for a further 30 secs and so on. The result of this constant speed seesawing was that it took over 1.5 hours to transfer the 505gb, around the speed I would expect from an old hard drive. But to be fair, if you were to put this into (say) a laptop and replace an old HDD, it would still dramatically improve the speed of boot up, because of its comparatively high read speeds and for normal everyday use the laptop would feel quick enough, unless you copied large amounts of data onto it regularly. So for normal everyday use, it is going to be adequately fast and represents good value for money. Update: Just uploaded 3GB of photos from a holiday shoot. At this size there was no speed reduction and the job was done in a few seconds. So unless you are transferring huge amounts of data, slow speed isn't going to be an issue. With regards cloning your existing hard drive to the new SSD, the instructions that come with the drive include information on where to download their free cloning software. I had a dummy run at this right up to the final instruction to start the cloning, and it was all very easy and intuitive. However, you will need to purchase an inexpensive enclosure to place the SSD in whilst cloning from your laptop. These are available on amazon for as little as £9. Probably the hardest thing you will have to do is remove the old HDD from your laptop after the cloning is complete. As laptop designs vary greatly, I can give no advice on this. However, once the SSD is in your laptop Windows will boot up just as before, but massively faster.

In my older PC this gave a great boost with its high capacity ease of installation and supurb performance excellent value highly recommended

My laptop came back to speed, perfect. Just not worth the price but that's nowadays AI and bitcoin databases.

Perfect for typical office work and light data storage, has been working flawlessly and for a reasonable price.

I upgraded laptop to a new one as my trusty 17 inch HP seemed on steam power taking forever to load up, run properly and shut down / update... to find the way it was ported over was half mine , half new and a % of programs that no longer worked.... so returned it as not for me... Upgrade from 1TB to 2TB and a faster item, after using Macrium I cloned drive ( but it does come with software, but I've used this for years ) 1 partition changed to put extra TB into windows drive. Pulled laptop apart, pulled old 2015 drive out and put this in. Put battery in and it boots. Faster under 30 secs from minutes, downloaded updates. And installs in seconds, power off under 20 secs. All software works ( apart from Outlook has lost profile but that's a Microsoft thing... be a YouTube to resolve) But £ for £ the fastest Upgrade for faster loading, programs opening and general made a 2016 laptop that was due to be binned into the better % and more usable again. Going to buy another for CCTV as far faster access and near instant write makes anything old and obsolete now the opposite....