Our roundup of the best SSDs for gaming contains just one SATA-based model, Crucial's MX500, and it happens to be deeply discounted right now. We highlight the 1TB model in our roundup, though the doubly capacious 2TB model is a better value right now, with it being marked down to $153.99 at Amazon.
That's $76 below its $229.99 list price. While it normally goes for a bit less than the full MSRP, street pricing over the past three months has typically bounced around between $185 and $215. And according to price tracking site CamelCamelCamel, this drive has never gone for less than $179.99.
So this is an all-time low. Granted, this is a 2.5-inch form factor SATA model, so you're not going to get the same kind of blazing fast speeds that M.2 form factor NVMe SSDs can deliver. But it's still much faster than a mechanical HDD with rated sequential read and write speeds of 560MB/s and 510MB/s, respectively.
At this moment in time, even a SATA-based SSD with these speeds is great for gaming. It will take some time for developers to start leveraging Microsoft's DirectStorage API, which allows them to make better use of faster PCIe 4.0 (and 3.0) SSDs, as is possible on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Not that you have to use this as a boot drive. With this sale price in play, the 2TB MX500 is a somewhat cost-effective secondary drive for bulk storage chores, and a secondary home to your growing Steam library.
Simply put, this is as cheap as it gets for 2TB of SSD storage. Looking at Newegg, for example, the least expensive 2TB model is a $174.99 (sale price) drive from a company called Leven.
