The Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB M.2 NVMe solid state drive is down to $89.99 on Amazon. This is the lowest price we have ever seen on Amazon, beating out previous deals by at least $10. The drive more often sells for around $120 or more, and I imagine today's deal won't last long. You can also find this price at Best Buy.
If you need more space, the 1TB drive and the 2TB version are both down to low prices they have been running at for a few months now. You can definitely upgrade and feel good about those prices, too.
You already know that solid state drives are the way to go when it comes to speeds much faster than hard drives. They are also in general more reliable because they don't have any moving parts. However, you should also know that there's a big difference between different types of SSDs. Particularly when we're talking about M.2 versus SATA form factors because M.2 SSDs can (although they don't always) have the NVMe protocol, which can increase the read and write speeds of your SSD by two times or more.
The 970 Evo Plus, for example, has a sequential read and write performance up to 3,500 MB/s and 3,300 MB/s respectively. Compare that to a SATA drive like the Samsung 860 EVO, which has read/write speeds of 550 and 520 MB/s. And that's still faster than a popular hard drive like the WD Red, which has read/write speeds around 150 MB/s. The 970 EVO Plus just puts them all to shame.
The 970 EVO Plus has a lot of other features, too. You can optimize the performance and protect your data. Get seamless cloning and file transfers using Samsung's Magician software. You'll receive automatic firmware updates, too. The Dynamic Thermal Guard protects your drive and monitors it for changes in the optimal temperature to help minimize performance drops.
Samsung covers the SSD with a warranty that's good for either five years or for the first 600 written terabytes.
