I got the Crucial 120 GB BX500 yesterday. It's seems lighter than average, and I think the housing may be made of plastic, or at least it feels like it. Is that a thing now? Maybe they're cutting cost not just on the innards, but also the shell.
It doesn't feel barn burning fast, but it's more than adequate, and is a significant improvement in performance over the hard drive not surprisingly. OS navigation speed is fine. From that perspective, I'd be fine using this as a daily machine at work if that's they gave to me. Is it as fast as my 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO? Probably not, but good enough for this type of use. I do think I can notice occasional short pauses but it's hard to compare since I've never had another SSD in this machine, and I've noticed short pauses with other faster drives and computers too on occasion.
Put it this way... I'd say that the BX500 as a boot drive for general usage is probably fine for 90% of the population. Only us geeks might notice some differences. But even for a geek like me, the performance loss isn't big enough for me to sacrifice my 500 GB Evo for this machine. I'd rather pay the US$22 and use a slow BX500 in this machine and keep the Evo for something else. I also don't know how much of what I'm noticing is related to the storage size. 120 GB isn't very much, and as you know, drives of this size are often slower than the bigger capacity SSDs.
Tom's did a review here and compared it to the 860 Evo among others:
Crucial's BX500 is designed to bring blazing SSD throughput to your PC at a low price, but it has a few caveats.
www.tomshardware.com
The BX500 is clearly slower where it matters (like game loading time and bulk transfers of lots of various sizes), but the speed is still adequate. In the review they have this drive doing way slower than the 860 EVO for 4K random reads:
However, that is still way faster than a lot of drives of yesteryear. For example, it is clearly faster than my ancient Kingston V+100 in real world usage. This is not surprising though, since the V+100 got dismal scores for 4K transfers in comparison:
So, all in all, I think for average users, this BX500 is fine, and I also think it's fine even for some geeks in their secondary machines, esp. if you're on a budget. I'd probably stick with a higher end drive for my primary personal machine though if possible.
is it really bad if i say mac's look pretty turned off and on the wall like Eug posted, then it being in a real working environment situation?
Since you brought this up... This is the setup I actually use. I think it looks OK.
2017 Core i5-7600 5K iMac on the right, and 2010 Core i7-870 2.5K iMac on the left that's just being used as a monitor for the other one.
From the back and sides, they look different, but from the front it's basically impossible to tell them apart on first glance, unless you look closer at the screen. (The one on the right is 5120x2880 and on the left it's 2560x1440.)