Upgrade your PC with these discounted SATA and NVMe Crucial SSDs

Today might be a good day to upgrade your desktop or laptop with fast solid state storage, as Amazon has discounted two top-tier Crucial drives to their lowest ever prices for today only. The Crucial BX500 is a 2.5-inch SATA drive that serves as a speedy replacement for traditional hard drives and works well in desktops and older laptops. At £40 for a 480GB model it offers excellent value overall at just 8p per gigabyte. Meanwhile, the Crucial P1 is a faster NVMe M.2 SSD, ideal for newer machines, that's been reduced £55 for a 500GB drive, 11p per gigabyte. Each is a cracking deal in its category, so if you're in the market they're definitely worth a look.

The BX500 is a long-time Digital Foundry favourite that actually serves as the basis of some of our test rigs, thanks to its decent performance and very cheap asking price. While the BX500 isn't the fastest SATA SSD on the market, it's still way faster than spinning disk hard drives thanks to its modern flash memory. You can expect read speeds up to 500MB/s and write speeds up to 550MB/s, roughly five times faster than a traditional HDD, plus even faster random access speeds. That results in faster Windows start-up times, up to 60 per cent lower game load times and more snappy performance all-around. This drive can be used on almost any modern PC thanks to its 2.5-inch form factor and SATA connectors, while drawing less power and boasting better reliability than a mechanical drive.

The Crucial P1 is more intended for enthusiasts and content creators, who can really benefit from its increased speed over SATA drives. While SATA drives are restricted to around 550MB/s, the Crucial P1 is rated for up to 2000MB/s read speeds and 1700MB/s write speeds, perfect for handling 4K video footage, and its random read/write speeds are competitive too. We still recommend drives like the £90 ADATA SX8200 Pro and £107 Samsung 970 Evo if you're looking for the flat-out best SSDs for gaming and content creation, but the Crucial P1 is considerably cheaper per gigabyte than these drives thanks to today's offer, while still offering performance in the same ballpark.

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