Crucial BX500

The Crucial BX500 4TB is a budget 2.5-inch SATA SSD that delivers huge capacity and easy installation for older laptops and desktops. It's not fast by modern NVMe standards, but it's a solid upgrade from any hard drive. If you need 4TB of cheap SATA storage and don't mind the DRAM-less design, this is a strong pick.

The BX500 tops out at 540 MB/s sequential read and 500 MB/s sequential write. That's the practical limit of the SATA III interface, so you're not leaving performance on the table. In our database, this puts the drive in the bottom quarter for speed and random performance compared to all SSDs, but that's an unfair fight when the competition includes PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 drives that hit 7,000 MB/s or more. For a SATA drive, these numbers are exactly what you'd expect.

In real-world terms, booting Windows from this drive will feel dramatically faster than a mechanical hard drive. Crucial claims 300% faster boot times compared to a typical HDD, and that tracks with what we've seen from SATA SSDs generally. Game load times will improve too, though not as much as they would on an NVMe drive. The DRAM-less design means sustained writes can dip under heavy load, but for everyday tasks like web browsing, office work, and loading older games, you won't notice a problem. The 1000 TBW endurance rating is solid for a budget drive, and the integrated power loss immunity is a nice touch for a drive in this price range.

Stacked against the Samsung 990 Pro or Western Digital Black SN850X, the BX500 looks like it's from another decade, because in interface terms, it is. Those NVMe drives are many times faster and aimed at gamers and creators who need every ounce of throughput. But they also cost more per gigabyte and require an M.2 slot, which older systems don't have. The Micron T710 and Seagate FireCuda 530R are in the same boat, they're PCIe Gen 4 drives that will absolutely smoke the BX500 in benchmarks but won't fit in a laptop with only a 2.5-inch bay.

Where the BX500 actually competes is against other SATA SSDs like the Samsung 870 EVO or Crucial's own MX500. The MX500 has DRAM, which gives it better sustained write performance, but it typically costs more. The BX500 trades that DRAM cache for a lower price and still delivers the same SATA speed ceiling for reads. If you're just replacing an old HDD and want maximum capacity for minimum cash, the BX500 is the more sensible pick. If you're running an OS and lots of write-heavy applications, the MX500 or 870 EVO might be worth the premium.

Pricing on the BX500 4TB is all over the place depending on where you shop. In the US, we're seeing listings from USD 479 to USD 649, which is a spread of USD 170 for the exact same drive. The best deal in our data comes from Amazon, where the lower end of that range applies. In Europe, the gap is even wider, with EUR prices ranging from EUR 540 to EUR 803 across German, Spanish, French, and Italian retailers. That's a EUR 263 difference, so it pays to shop around. For a 4TB SATA SSD, the lower end of these ranges is competitive, but at the high end you're creeping into territory where a 4TB NVMe drive starts to look tempting, assuming your system can use one.

The Crucial BX500 4TB is a 2.5-inch SATA III internal SSD aimed at people who need a lot of storage without spending NVMe money. It's a budget-friendly way to replace a spinning hard drive in an older laptop or desktop, and it sits in a crowded field of SATA drives that all promise the same basic thing: make your old machine feel less old. With 4TB of TLC NAND and a DRAM-less design, this drive is all about capacity per dollar, not raw speed.

If you're searching for a 4TB SSD for a laptop or desktop, the BX500 is one of the cheapest ways to get there. It's rated for 540 MB/s read and 500 MB/s write, which is about as fast as the SATA III interface allows. That's nowhere near what a modern NVMe drive can do, but if your system only has SATA ports, this is the ceiling. The drive also carries a 3-year warranty and a 1,500,000 hour MTBF rating, which is standard fare for this class.

We see a lot of drives in our database, and the BX500 lands in an interesting spot. Its capacity is top-tier for a 2.5-inch SATA drive, but its speed scores are near the bottom of the barrel compared to all SSDs, including NVMe models. That's not a knock on Crucial specifically, it's just the reality of SATA in a PCIe world. For the right use case, though, this drive makes a lot of sense.

Skip the BX500 if your system has an M.2 slot and you care about speed. Anyone doing 4K video editing, large database work, or frequent multi-gigabyte file transfers will feel the lack of DRAM and the SATA bottleneck. Gamers with modern motherboards should look at NVMe drives like the Samsung 990 Pro or WD Black SN850X instead. And if you're building a new PC from scratch, there's almost no reason to choose SATA for your primary drive in 2025. This drive is for upgrading old machines, not building new ones.

Should you buy the Crucial BX500 4TB? If you have an older laptop or desktop with a 2.5-inch SATA bay and you want to breathe new life into it without spending a fortune, yes. This drive is a straightforward, reliable way to get 4TB of solid state storage into a machine that can't take advantage of NVMe speeds anyway. The easy installation and huge capacity are exactly what most people upgrading from a hard drive are looking for.

But if you have an M.2 slot available, or if you do heavy video editing, large file transfers, or anything that benefits from high sustained write speeds, skip this and get an NVMe drive. The BX500 is a budget SATA SSD, and it's honest about that. For the right machine and the right workload, it's a great value. For everything else, it's a bottleneck.