Crucial MX500 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD - Up to 560MB/s - CT250MX500SSD1, Metallique, 250 GB

I bought this crucial mx500 250gb SSD to replace my old boot SSD drive in my gaming pc and I am super impressed with it so far the crucial mx500 it is extremely fast it gave new life to my computer I used to get frequent crashes and my computer used to be quite slow but I'm happy to report that the crucial mx500 has fixed these issues I went from booting in 35 seconds to now only 20 seconds. it's also very high quality the case is made of aluminium which helps disapate heat it also has dram which helps a lot with speed it also has a 100tb endurance to ensure a long life span it also has software which you can download to optimise your SSD you can keep your SSD up to date, check the temperature and check your SSD health I find this extremely useful it's a very well made SSD. I only buy crucial drives as I find them to be the best they are very fast reliable and professional overall I would highly recommend the crucial mx500 it is an excellent SSD especially for the price

Firstly the good - this SSD HDD has breathed new life into a 7 year old HP laptop. To give a real life example from switched off to playing a stream on BBC iPlayer took 4mins 30seconds with the original hard drive. With this SSD it now takes 45 seconds. It takes about 25 seconds to fully boot up and get to the desktop. Everything is simply much, much quicker.The not so good is the Crucial Acronis software for cloning the HDD. It’s slow and not really user friendly. I’m a complete novice at changing a HDD so that didn’t help but after hours of trying and getting failed to copy messages I googled a solution. I downloaded a free program called Macrium Reflect (Free edition) and successfully achieved a complete clone first go.The actual physical process of changing the disc was a doddle.My tips to a complete novice. Firstly you’ll need to “initiate” the new HDD otherwise when it’s connected by the SATA to USB cable your machine won’t recognise it. Use an “add disc” tool (there is one on Acronis) first and then you’ll be able to see the disc. The second tip if like me you were going from 1tb down to 250gb you’ll need to play around with partition sizes. Windows has a tool for that. Essentially a partition is a chunk of disc space set aside - in my case around 800gb of mainly empty space - I assumed the cloning software would just shrink the partition for me - it didn’t so I had to do that first so that it would fit. What I liked about the Macrium Reflect software was that you could see a representation of the two discs and could drag and drop the partitions into the new drive. On my original drive there was a recovery partition using drag and drop I was able to ignore that partition and not move it over. I also liked the progress bar so I was more confident everything was transferring as it should.Leaving aside the software and user ignorance the SSD itself is 5 star. It’s fast and silent and my laptop is running better than it ever did!

As I use Linux Fedora as an operating system I only require a small SSD for my system files, most of my data is stored on a large Segate Barracuda 3i/2 hard drive. Using this set up enables be to swiftly try out various linux distros , for this purpose I have found Crucial SSD's to be ideal.

Over 5 years, my old HDD got slower and slower and no amount of software-based fixes were helping. It was taking 15 minutes from pressing the "on" button until it was usable. I realised I needed to reinstall Windows and start afresh and so it was a no-brainer to upgrade the HDD to a SSD at the same time.Steps:1) Go to the Windows website and use their Media Creation Tool to create a USB drive to start the new Windows installation from. Took me half an hour.2) Turn off the laptop and pop out the battery. Open the panel on the bottom of the laptop. 8 screws to remove the old hard drive and the same 8 to put the new one in. Took me 10 minutes. (Care to Earth yourself first -- I touched the exposed metal on the nearest radiator -- and care removing the cable connector: it just needs a very firm and careful pull, but make sure not to snatch against the cable in case you pull the other end off the motherboard.)3) Replace the panel and the battery, plug in the USB drive and turn it on. Windows starts installing itself, just like a new purchase. Run the Update tool (just type "update" into the Start Menu) to get the latest of everything, including drivers. Then install all your other software.Took me about 3 hours all in. My "new" 5-year old laptop now goes from "on" button to usable in 20 seconds!! And it is generally so much faster while using all programs. It's like I went out and bought a new laptop -- for £37! (I only needed the 250GB SSD -- my old HDD had less than half that on it.)Top tip -- I already had an external USB HDD enclosure, so popped my old HDD into that and transferred all my files across from my C:\Users folder by USB. BUT...It completely didn't occur to me that my "new" Windows account wasn't my "old" Windows account and I no longer had permission to access my files! You can Google the solution, which turned out to be irritatingly time-consuming (another hour). If I was doing it again, I'd change the permissions on my files BEFORE I replaced the HDD, to make them all "public"!

I've recently gone all nostalgic and dragged my old backwards compatible PS3 out of retirement having not used it much since getting a PS5. The HDD chugged along okay but I wanted to experiment with an SSD and research led me to thus Crucial model.Its a bit of a faff to backup and files you want and to update the software, but it runs faster and smooth. The XMB seems a touch snappier, in-game textures seem to load a bit quicker and there's no noise or heat created by it.Might risk sticking a 19 blade fan in next! (Gulp!)