The most affordable way to make an older machine feel faster is by replacing the spinning hard disk drive with the Samsung SSD 870 EVO 2TB 2.5-inch SSD. The 2TB will hold your Windows install, a complete library of games, and years’ worth of photos on one drive, so you won’t have to worry about running out of space or moving anything to an external drive. Your PC can read data from it at speeds of up to 560 MB/s and write data to it at up to 530 MB/s, which is as fast as the SATA interface will allow. Samsung also provides free migration software that will help you transfer your current setup to this new SSD, and it has a five-year limited warranty.
Head over to Amazon to get the Samsung SSD 870 EVO 2TB 2.5-inch SSD for just $400, down from its usual price of $1,040. That’s a $640 discount and 62% off.
A sizable SSD to help expand your computer’s storage capacity
The 2.5-inch size is the standard drive bay measurement for laptops and for desktop mounting brackets, so the 870 EVO drops into most machines without an adapter of any kind. It connects over SATA III at 6Gb/s, but it will also work on the older 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s ports, which means a desktop built ten years ago can take this drive without you adding a controller card first.
Intelligent TurboWrite reserves a section of the drive as a fast write buffer, and the buffer on the 2TB version is larger than the ones on the smaller capacities. What you notice is that a big file copy holds its speed further into the transfer instead of slowing down halfway through.
Endurance on the 2TB model has been rated by Samsung at 1,200 terabytes written, and it also comes with a five-year warranty. That warranty runs out at five years or once you reach the 1,200 TBW rating, whichever occurs first. As for the workload rating, Samsung covers everything from typical desktop use up through editing and processing 8K video. On a drive that holds an operating system and gets written to every day, those numbers give you a long window before anything wears out.
Samsung tested this drive against major chipsets, motherboards, network-attached storage systems, and video recording equipment. That last part is worth knowing, because a 2.5-inch SATA drive frequently ends up somewhere other than a desktop tower, and a NAS enclosure keeps its drives spinning constantly instead of powering down between sessions.
Installing it is as easy as sliding the drive into a 2.5-inch bay and connecting the data and power cables. Samsung’s migration software then copies your existing operating system onto the new drive, so a working copy of Windows moves across without a reinstall. Samsung Magician 6 takes over afterward for firmware updates, drive health monitoring, and performance settings.
At $400, down from $1,040, the Samsung SSD 870 EVO 2TB 2.5-inch SSD puts two terabytes into one bay rather than splitting it across two drives. Bear in mind that no mounting bracket or SATA cable comes in the box.