At CES 2018 memory and storage gurus, Crucial, launched their MX500 SSD range. For the last week, I have been putting one of these hard drives through its paces.

Anyone still booting their PC from a traditional hard disk, really needs to think about the amount of valuable time they sit in front their machine waiting for it to start. Solid state drives have been around for years, but it’s only in the last few that they’ve been reasonably priced, and only very recently that you’ve been able to purchase on with a reasonable amount of storage space.

Crucial’s new MX500 SSDs are available in capacities of up to 2TB in the traditional 2.5” form factor or 1TB in the M.2 form factor. We were sent a 1TB 2.5 to test out.

The MX500 is Crucial’s second generation of SSDs, boasting Micron 2nd Generation 64-layer 3D TLC NAND, sequential read/writes up to 560/510 MB/s, random read/writes of up to 95K/90K IOPS and a 5-year limited warranty.

If you buy a new drive you really want the installation to go without a hitch. Whilst I didn’t need to copy my operating system across, if you did want to, the included Acronis True Image HD software will transfer your files relatively painlessly. I’ve used the software, previously, and whilst watching you data get moved to a new storage device is always a bit nerve-racking, it did the job without a hitch.

You can also download Crucial’s Storage Executive software tool if you want to monitor your drive performance. You can check temperatures and enable optional, performance-enhancing features such as momentum cache and overprovisioning.

The MX500 was installed via a SATA3 mini PCIe 6/Gb/s expansion card in our i7 7700k-based rig built around an ASUS STRIX Z270E Gaming motherboard with 32GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR-3200.

Testing the drive in our review rig the results were impressive, especially compared to our 3GB Seagate Barracuda. Whilst the Barracuda delivered a none too shabby maximum read of 202.6 MB/s and a write speed of 187.0 MB/s, the MX500 achieved double the speed with a 420.8 MB/s read and 369.6 MB/s write.

The great read and write speeds comes with the backing of Crucial’s mature next generation SSD technology to better protect your data. The drive is easy to install and comes complete with the tools you need to transfer your files across.

With Crucial’s MX500 drives costing around NZ$470 for the 1TB version, you get real performance at a modest price that no discerning PC owner should overlook.