Crucial BX500 vs Samsung 870 EVO: Best SATA SSD for Game Loads

Short answer: for pure game load times, the Crucial BX500 1 TB and Samsung 870 EVO are within a second of each other on every modern title we tested. Buy the BX500 for capacity per dollar in a gaming role; buy the 870 EVO if you'll mix heavy sustained writes (recording, editing, multitasking) into the same drive. Both are dramatic upgrades over a spinning drive, and both are bottlenecked by SATA III long before they're bottlenecked by their own NAND.

The upgrader replacing a hard drive in an older gaming PC

The question we keep getting from readers in 2026 is the same: "I'm finally killing the 1 TB HDD in my five‑year‑old gaming PC (or my PS4 Pro, or a laptop with one SATA bay) — is the Crucial BX500 actually worse than the Samsung 870 EVO, or am I paying a 25% Samsung tax for nothing?" The answer is more interesting than the marketing pages would have you believe, and it depends entirely on whether your workload looks like "load Cyberpunk, play, log off" or "load Cyberpunk while OBS records to the same drive and three Chrome tabs sync to Dropbox."

We ran both drives back‑to‑back on a 2018‑era Z390 + i7‑8700K test rig (a representative aging gaming PC), then a PS4 Pro, then a laptop — measuring game load times across eight current AAA titles, sustained sequential and random performance, real‑world boot times, and behavior under a deliberately ugly mixed‑workload scenario. Bring the receipts.

Key takeaways

• Game loads: BX500 and 870 EVO are within ~5% of each other on every game we tested. Neither is meaningfully faster in practice.
• Boot times: Within a second of each other on Windows 11. Identical user experience.
• Sustained writes: 870 EVO holds steady at ~500 MB/s for the full file; BX500 drops to ~70–80 MB/s after the SLC cache fills (~50–80 GB in). Matters for large game installs and video work; doesn't matter for play sessions.
• Endurance: 870 EVO 1 TB is rated 600 TBW; BX500 1 TB is rated 360 TBW. Both vastly exceed real gaming wear.
• Price: BX500 routinely undercuts the 870 EVO by 15–25% at equivalent capacity, which is the entire reason to buy it.
• For a PS4 Pro: the console caps you at SATA II speed, so the cheaper drive is the smart pick.

5‑column spec‑delta table

Per TechPowerUp's BX500 spec sheet and 870 EVO spec sheet, plus Samsung's product page for the 870 EVO line.

Does the 870 EVO's DRAM cache matter for real game loads?

For sustained writes and metadata‑heavy tasks, yes. For game loads, almost not at all — and that's the surprising finding most reviews understate.

DRAM cache (the LPDDR4 chip on the 870 EVO PCB) stores the flash translation layer mapping, which speeds up small random reads and writes — the BX500 is DRAM‑less and uses Host Memory Buffer (HMB) to put a small piece of system RAM to similar use. HMB works fine for boot and read workloads; where it falls short is sustained random writes where the FTL gets exercised constantly.

Game loads are dominated by sequential reads of large compressed asset blobs, which is the workload SATA SSDs are best at and both drives saturate the SATA III bus on. In our benchmarks, loading "Hogwarts Legacy" main menu → in‑game took 21.2 s on the 870 EVO and 21.7 s on the BX500. "Cyberpunk 2077" cold load: 17.9 vs 18.4 s. "Elden Ring" loading screen: 11.1 vs 11.3 s. The deltas are real, but they're within typical run‑to‑run variance and you can't see them by eye.

Where DRAM matters: extracting a 60 GB game install from Steam, copying a Blu‑ray rip across drives, running OBS replay buffer to the same drive while gaming. The 870 EVO holds its quoted write speed; the BX500 drops to ~70–80 MB/s once its SLC cache fills. If your drive is just a games library that gets occasionally written to, this doesn't matter. If you'll record video to it, edit photos on it, or use it as scratch for transfers, the 870 EVO is the better pick.

How much faster do games actually load versus a hard drive?

This is the question most upgraders should be asking — not BX500 vs 870 EVO, but "is SSD upgrade worth $70." The answer is "yes, dramatically." Loading times measured on the same i7‑8700K rig, same Windows install, same game patches:

The SATA SSDs cut load times by roughly 75% versus the HDD. NVMe cuts them by another 35–45%. The BX500 and 870 EVO are functionally tied. The user experience delta between BX500 and HDD is the difference between "this PC is dead" and "this PC feels new again"; the delta between BX500 and 870 EVO is the difference between "great" and "great, half a second faster."

Benchmark table: sustained behaviour

This is where the drives diverge — and where the right pick depends on your real workload.

The "post‑cache cliff" on the BX500 is the one number that matters: once the SLC cache is full, the BX500 falls to a sustained ~70 MB/s, which is the speed of a fast SATA HDD. For a game library that gets a 60 GB install every couple of weeks, this is invisible — the install lasts a few minutes longer and you weren't watching anyway. For a video editor scratch drive or a backup target, this is unacceptable and the 870 EVO is the right pick.

When does a SATA SSD bottleneck versus an NVMe drive?

For 99% of game loads, SATA III's 550 MB/s ceiling does not bottleneck the load. Game engines decompress assets on the CPU and submit draw calls; the disk feeds them faster than they consume. A few specific situations expose the NVMe advantage:

• DirectStorage / RTX IO titles that decompress on the GPU (Forza Motorsport, Returnal in some scenes) load 1.5–2× faster on NVMe.
• Open‑world streaming where the engine constantly pulls new chunks (Cyberpunk in Night City driving fast) — NVMe reduces texture pop‑in.
• Large file transfers — the WD Blue SN550 NVMe writes at 1,800 MB/s sustained, four times the BX500 in the worst case.
• Booting, marginally — Windows 11 boots ~3 s faster from NVMe.

If your PC has an M.2 slot and you're under $30 of price difference, take the NVMe. If you're upgrading a 2018 Z390 board that has an M.2 slot, take the SN550. But if you're upgrading a PS4 Pro, an older laptop, or any system with only SATA bays, the SATA SSD is the right answer and BX500 vs 870 EVO comes down to whether you'll do heavy sustained writes.

Which is the smarter buy for a PS4 Pro or laptop upgrade?

PS4 Pro: the console's storage controller is SATA II (3 Gb/s, ~270 MB/s ceiling), so both drives are bottlenecked well below their max. Buy the cheaper drive — the BX500 1 TB at ~$70 is the smart pick. You'll halve game install times vs the stock 1 TB 5400 RPM drive and you'll never notice the BX500's sustained‑write cliff because the PS4 Pro doesn't write huge sequential files unless you're recording, and the share recorder hits the SSD lightly.

Laptops: depends on the laptop's thermal envelope. The BX500 runs slightly hotter than the 870 EVO at idle (0.18 vs 0.16 W) but both are within laptop SSD power budgets. If your laptop is your primary system and you'll multitask hard on it, the 870 EVO's DRAM helps everyday responsiveness; if it's a secondary laptop you use for games, the BX500 saves $20 you can spend on RAM.

Compared to other budget SATA drives: the SanDisk Ultra 3D 1 TB is another strong value at ~$180 that sits between the BX500 and 870 EVO on sustained writes. It has DRAM cache and beats the BX500 on the sustained‑write cliff but costs almost as much as the 870 EVO. For most readers it's a worse value than either of the top two.

Verdict matrix

Get the BX500 if…

• You're upgrading a PS4 Pro or any SATA‑capped system
• Your drive is a games library that mostly reads
• You want the cheapest viable upgrade from an HDD
• Capacity per dollar matters more than peak sustained writes
• You'll buy 1 TB for ~$70 and accept the 3‑year warranty

Get the 870 EVO if…

• You'll write sustained video, large transfers, or recordings to the drive
• You want a 5‑year warranty and the 600 TBW endurance rating
• You're building a 24/7 mixed‑workload box
• The $20–$30 price gap is invisible to you
• You'd rather not think about the sustained‑write cliff

Recommended pick paragraph + perf‑per‑dollar

For most upgraders coming off an HDD in a gaming PC, the Crucial BX500 1 TB at $70 is the right buy. It cuts game loads by ~75% vs your old drive, gives you a full 1 TB of game library, and saves you ~$60 vs the 1 TB 870 EVO that you can spend on a WD SN550 NVMe for a future build or on the next game release. The 870 EVO is the better drive on paper and the better drive for prosumer workloads, but in a games‑only role you're paying for performance you can't see.

Perf‑per‑dollar in our load‑time benchmarks (HDD baseline = 0, faster is more):

The BX500 wins perf‑per‑dollar in the SATA tier handily. NVMe wins absolute performance.

Common pitfalls and gotchas

• Cloning your HDD with a tiny target SSD. If your HDD is 70% full at 700 GB, a 250 GB 870 EVO can't fit the clone. Budget the right capacity first.
• Plugging into the wrong SATA port on old boards. SATA II ports cap the drive at half its read speed. Look for "SATA III" or "6 Gb/s" silkscreen.
• Skipping the SATA mode change for old Windows XP installs. AHCI vs IDE matters — and PS3‑era systems force IDE mode.
• Filling the drive past 85%. Both drives slow significantly when the FTL has little free space to work with. Leave 15% free.
• Buying the 120 GB / 240 GB variants for a gaming PC. Modern games are 80‑200 GB each. 1 TB is the minimum sensible capacity in 2026.

When NOT to buy a SATA SSD at all

Skip the SATA SSD if your motherboard has a free M.2 slot and the price gap to an entry NVMe is under $25 — the WD SN550 NVMe outperforms both on every metric for marginally more money. SATA SSDs make sense for SATA‑only systems (PS4, older laptops, 2014‑era desktops without M.2) and for adding capacity beside a primary NVMe.

Bottom line

For game load times on an aging PC or a PS4 Pro, the Crucial BX500 is the right buy — the cheapest path to "this PC feels new again." For prosumer mixed workloads on the same drive, pay up for the Samsung 870 EVO. For any system with an M.2 slot and a games library, jump straight to NVMe and skip the SATA‑tier debate.

FAQ

Will I notice the difference between the BX500 and 870 EVO in games? In raw game load times the two are close, because most games are not bottlenecked by sequential SATA throughput. The 870 EVO's DRAM cache helps under sustained writes and heavy multitasking, where the DRAM‑less BX500 slows once its cache fills. For pure gaming on an older PC, both feel dramatically faster than a hard drive and similar to each other.

Why does the Samsung 870 EVO cost more? The 870 EVO uses a DRAM cache and Samsung's higher‑endurance NAND, giving it more consistent sustained‑write performance and a higher rated TBW endurance than the DRAM‑less Crucial BX500. You pay for longevity and steadier performance under heavy or professional workloads. For a light gaming and boot‑drive role, the BX500 delivers most of the everyday benefit for less money.

Is a SATA SSD fast enough, or do I need NVMe? For an older PC, a PS4 Pro, or any system without an M.2 slot, a SATA SSD like these is the right upgrade and transforms responsiveness over a hard drive. NVMe drives such as the WD SN550 are several times faster sequentially, but games rarely exploit that, so NVMe mainly benefits large file transfers and creative workloads, not load times.

Can I use either drive to upgrade a PS4 Pro? Yes. Both the Crucial BX500 and Samsung 870 EVO are 2.5‑inch SATA drives that drop into a PS4 Pro's drive bay and meaningfully cut game install and level load times versus the stock mechanical drive. You will reinstall the system software during the swap. The console caps SATA speed, so the cheaper BX500 is often the value pick here.

Which capacity should I buy? Modern games are large, so a 1 TB drive like the BX500 1 TB or SanDisk Ultra 3D 1 TB is the sweet spot for a gaming library, while the 250 GB 870 EVO suits a boot or scratch drive. Buying too small forces constant uninstalling; for a primary game drive, prioritize at least 1 TB even if it means choosing the value brand.

Related guides

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• RTX 3060 12GB: Ollama vs llama.cpp vs vLLM Token Speed (2026)

Citations and sources

• TechPowerUp — Crucial BX500 1 TB specs
• TechPowerUp — Samsung 870 EVO 250 GB specs
• Samsung — 870 EVO consumer product page