1TB Crucial MX500 2.5" SATA Internal Solid State Drive Expired

The price is exactly $72.99 if you use the B&H payboo credit card, which "saves the tax" on your order. The price without said card is $$72.99 + tax. Pretty much everywhere (crucial's website, best buy, amazon, newegg, etc.) is selling this ssd at $85 currently, so this is a decent discount. This is a 2.5" sata internal ssd, meaning it's far slower than pretty much any nvme drive; if you do not specifically require a sata drive you should go for a nvme drive instead.
The crucial MX500 is one of the top performing 2.5" internal ssds on the market currently with a Sequential Read speed of 560MB/s and a Sequential Write speed of 510MB/s ("Typical I/O performance numbers as measured using IOMeter® with a queue depth of 32 and write cache enabled. Fresh out-of-the-box (FOB) state is assumed"). 4K random read performance is excellent, and 4K random write performance is more than sufficient. It's performance is somewhat below the $100 2.5" samsung 870 evo, but it's a good deal less expensive and in real world applications there should be hardly any discernible difference. It has a dram cache (unlike the cheaper bx500 model), the 1tb version has a "1 GB DRAM cache buffer". Toms hardware has a review of this drive, testing results are here: https://www.tomshardware.com/revi...390-3.html
The 1tb capactiy mx500 has a TBW (terabytes written) endurance of 360TBW, which is substantially lower than many competitors (the 2.5" samsung 870 evo, for instance, has a 600TBW, and many less reputable brands have significantly higher TBW though said numbers are questionable). That being said, the chances of a normal user actually exceeding 360TBW before they cease using an obsolete sata drive are minimal. The impression I've gotten from sifting through an enormous amount of user reviews for a variety of 2.5" ssds seem to indicate the crucial mx500 has a fairly low failure rate relative to other ssds in its price range, and overall ratings support this. The 1tb mx500 has a manufacturer 5 year limited warranty, the warranty requires the drive to be shipped to crucial at owners expense, the replacement or repaired drive is sent back at crucials expense. Bhphotovideo is listed on crucials "partners-where-to-buy" page, so manufacturer warranty applies.
Overall, if you're looking for a boot drive for a computer (likely a laptop) that requires sata this is probably the best deal currently available. If you're looking for a mass storage/backup ssd that doesn't need to be quite as fast or reliable you could probably get a cheaper brand and/or a dramless drive. If you have nvme slots get a nvme drive instead, they're far faster and are barely more expensive.

For those comparing recent SSD prices on here, most of the SSDs below this price range are dramless. The MX 500 actually has dram memory so it should work great as a boot drive and for storage (dramless drives aren't recommended as boot drives). Good deal for a good SSD.

There are several considerations. Raw short term speed, sustained speed, latency, power efficiency, stability/compatibility and support when it breaks, price, are the main ones I look at. Quite frankly, most people just look at raw speed and price, so some manufacturers game the benchmarks to maximize the raw short term speed and game the price. Reputable manufacturers dont game it, This MX500 is a very very solid drive and worth buying for an internal drive.

Within 20-30% or more, you wont notice that much the difference in raw short term speed, but the others matter quite a bit. For an internal BOOT drive, you should go for an NVMe, but some people have old motherboards that dont have it. So those people want a SATA SSD, which because of low latency (delay to respond), is better than a NVMe going thru a USB bus. A thunderbolt external enclosure ($$) has low latency, and is the better option except that the enclosure costs more than the MX500 drive. Many people say why not buy XXX sata, its dirt cheap and the raw speed is 500 MB/sec. So the second thing I look at is the sustained speed. The reason the raw speed is so high is because there is a cache (small amount of very fast memory - either DRAM (faster) or SLC (slower, cheaper). When the cache is full from transferring data, the transfer speed slows way down. So the size of the cache and the sustained transfer rate matters a whole lot. There is one manufacturer (actually recommended by a person) that when the cache becomes full, the transfer rate goes from 500 MB/sec to ~ 20MB/sec. That is 10x slower than a spinning hard drive!! The MX500 sustained rate is 200 MB/sec. e.g. it starts out around 500 MB/sec and then drops to 200 MB/sec. This cheaper drive goes from 500 MB/sec to 20 MB/sec. 20MB/sec is not usable. NVMe is way better than 500MB/sec, think 1000 - 5000+ MB/sec, It makes a difference in a boot drive, but at some point, depending on what you do, you will not be able to tell the difference between something that takes .2 sec vs .05 sec even if it is 4x faster. Some applications like video editing you will see a difference between 10 sec and 2 sec to do something if you do it a lot. But again, if you use an NVMe in a USB enclosure, that is limited to (USB 3.1R2 most popular) to 1000MB/sec, That is 2x faster than SATA. If your NVMe drive is external, it doesnt much matter if it is 3000MB/sec or 5000MB/sec if the enclosure limits both to 1000 MB/sec, Worse, it depends on compatibility. I have a 5000 MB/sec NVMe drive in a thunderbolt enclosure that runs at 400MB/sec because it isnt compatible! Finally, power efficiency matters because if your drive heats up, then the drive slows way down. And if it breaks, you will find that most of these cheap fast drives have effectively no warranty beyond the 30 days the seller provides. You cant even get them to respond. So it doesnt matter if it has a 3 year or 5 year warranty, It is effectively 30 days. All those considerations factor in. My current best affordable drive recommendations are the MX500 for a SATA SSD and for a NVMe 1.3 drives, the Hynix P31 (power efficient) and Samsung 970 Evo plus. Those hit the sweet spot for me in terms of real world performance, stability, support and price. (One caveat - I have not had experience with Hynix support. I have with Crucial and Samsung) Rather than chase cheapo drives, I wait for sales on these. Finally, some manufacturers game the price by sending new drives with top notch components for review and then after great reviews, swap out components with lower performing parts. I see people posting these great reviews and cheap prices on these as well. Hope this answers some of your questions.