HDD
SSD
...AND HERE IT IS. Western Digital’s
HDDs are still some of the best in
the business, running quietly and
not drawing too much power from
your build. A terabyte of storage
for just 40 dollars is a steal, too;
a far cry from the pricey, bulky
drives of yesteryear. The Q500L
can support up to four SATA SSDs
or two HDDs, so we’ve still got
room for one more SSD on those
drive brackets, should we decide
to upgrade—alternatively, there’s
plenty of space on the motherboard
for a speedy M.2 drive.WESTERN
DIGITAL
BLUE 1TB
$40CRUCIAL ALWAYS HAS it covered when it comes
to SSDs. This time around, we’re using its
MX500, giving us half a terabyte of SATA
storage to play with. This will be our boot
drive, containing the OS and immediate file
storage. We did look into using a smaller M.2
SSD for our primary drive, but even the launch
of NVMe Gen4 hasn’t lowered the prices of
older M.2 drives enough for this low-cost build,
so we’re sticking with SATA for now. 500GB
isn’t quite enough for a full system, though, so
we’ve enlisted some backup....CRUCIAL MX500
500GB $64
$500 build
28 MAXIMUMPC DEC 2019 maximumpc.com
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