Get the Samsung 870 Qvo 2TB for £146 (was £170)
Get the Crucial MX500 2TB for £159 (was £179)
As Katharine points out in her seminal ‘Best SSD for gaming’ piece, the Crucial MX500 and Samsung 870 Qvo are both excellent choices when it comes to outfitting your gaming PC or laptop. The 870 Qvo provides better overall value, thanks to its 4-bit QLC NAND flash, which allows more capacity at a given cost; meanwhile the Crucial MX500 uses 3-bit MLC NAND that offers slightly better random write performance but in turn costs a bit more.
Both will perform superbly for game and media storage, but I’d recommend the MX500 if you’ll be using this as your primary drive with your Windows and most apps installed - as its slightly better random performance should provide a small boost to responsiveness and load times. Interestingly, the two drives are nearly identical in terms of endurance, with the Crucial listed at 700TB written and the Samsung 870 Qvo at 720TB. Normally you’d expect QLC drives to suffer here, but the 870 Qvo is much newer and therefore benefits from the more modern management techniques of its Samsung MKX controller.
So there we have it! There’s not much more to write about these SSDs, beyond saying that they’ll also go nicely in an enclosure or with a SATA to USB adapter, turning them from potent internal drives to convenient portable solutions that are still capable of hitting some blistering speeds - compared to hard drives, at least.
We’ll keep an eye out for more SSD deals going forward, and remember you can check out that best SSD piece linked above for our all-time recommendations. Thanks for joining us once again and we’ll catch you with more dealz later!
