It’s time to pack it up. Crucial is phasing out its wildly popular MX500 SSD, which has been one of the most popular and best SSDs you can buy for close to seven years. I’ve personally recommended it countless times, and I’ve had one plugging away in my personal system for over five years.
Since it was introduced in the opening weeks of 2018, the Crucial MX500 has been at the top of bestseller charts — and for good reason. It’s an inexpensive 2.5-inch SATA SSD, and it’s available all the way up to 4TB. It was also frequently on sale. Reddit user u/iEngineered snagged a 4TB model on Prime Day last year, but it failed earlier this month. After making a warranty request, Crucial informed the user that the 4TB model was no longer in production.
Crucial confirmed to ComputerBase that the MX500 is being discontinued. On Crucial’s website, the 4TB and 250GB versions have an “end of life” badge, while the remaining capacity options are out of stock. Retailers still have remaining inventory, thankfully. The 2TB version, for example, is on sale on Amazon for 17% off right now.
Although the MX500 has reached legendary status within the PC hardware community, that’s not because it’s particularly fast. This is a SATA SSD, and it only claims sequential read speeds of up to 560MB/s. Even a last-gen M.2 SSD like the Samsung 990 Pro can reach speeds of up to 7,450MB/s. The MX500 was popular because it was inexpensive, provided a ton of storage, and came with a rare five-year warranty.
I still have a 2TB MX500 rocking in my personal PC, which I use alongside an 1TB M.2 drive to store games. Despite the massive delta in speed, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which games are installed on which drive unless I specifically look for them. It’s true that M.2 drives are slowly becoming the norm, but there’s something to be said for large-capacity SATA drives that just work, especially when they don’t cost a lot of money.
It’s not a shock to see the MX500 go, however. Not only are motherboards packing more M.2 slots — at least three, and sometimes five or more — but M.2 NVMe drives have also drastically dropped in price. For example, the Samsung 990 Evo Plus is actually available for $30 less than the 4TB MX500, despite speeds that are 10 times as fast.
Old souls may look back on the MX500 fondly — I certainly do, and I plan on running my own MX500 into the ground until it completely gives out — but the situation today is much different than it was seven years ago. So, pour one out for the MX500, but don’t mourn its loss too much. There are much better options available today.
