1TB Crucial MX500 2.5" 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive Expired

Hey there .. a few suggestions for you.. and not trying to sound like a jerk I swear but I've found reading the manual for motherboards to be really, really important .. I know it's a pain in the butt having to read the whole thing but there really is a lot of valuable information in there ..


https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherbo...ort-manual



for example I never would have known that my Asus motherboard doesn't "like" ram sticks put into the "wrong' memory slots if I'd never read the manual... the manual will also give important info like how to install an m2 drive, page 22 in your case... don't be stupid like me use the heatsink that's included with the motherboard (fortunately my son hasn't bothered to use the m2 drive yet I installed on his desktop PC but I really need to get around to uninstalling it, reinstalling it into the heatsink and then installing the heatsink back into the appropriate m2 slot)



Opinions are divided online I've found as far as whether or not a heatsink is necessary for m2 drives all the time , one person on the tom's hardware forums (that's a GREAT place to ask questions like your own by the way, good people they help me out all the time ) who I see as an expert given his ranking on there and his number of posts seems to feel pci 3 speed m2 drives really don't need a heatsink but you absolutely need one for a pci4 m2 drive (which is why I've been lazy on getting the heatsink onto my son's pci 3 speed m2 drive)



Now is a GREAT time to buy m2 drives if you can afford them, for example



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MFZY..._lig_dp_it



SAMSUNG 970 EVO Plus SSD 1TB NVMe M.2 Internal Solid State Hard Drive, V-NAND Technology, Storage and Memory Expansion for Gaming, Graphics w/ Heat Control, Max Speed, MZ-V7S1T0B/AM , $55 on amazon and from what I've seen online it gets some great ratings.. I would go so far as to use something like the free version of Macrium Reflect to clone your windows installation over to that or any m2 drive you buy and run windows off that instead then format your old windows drive and use it for storage (going on the assumption you built your PC and it's up and running already?)



If you have an empty sata slot and you have the 640 GB WD drive lying around you might as well use it .. though I would use it as a data/file drive... try downloading crystalmarkdiskinfo



https://crystalmark.info/en/softw...ldiskinfo/



and use that to run a check on the drive after you install it to see if the drive is in "trouble" , the software will tell you if the drive is starting to die.. worth noting I've had one drive die on me with crystalmark not warning me but it was an ancient drive so I can't complain too much ... treat any files on that drive as files that can vanish on you any day since you mentioned it was an old drive.



Oddly enough despite not being specifically designed for desktop use the western digital red plus drives (I would stick with red plus not the "western digital red" drives) are pretty cheap right now and have been working great for me for file storage ever since amazon sent me one by mistake years ago and let me keep it for free ...


https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BDXSK..._lig_dp_it



Western Digital 4TB WD Red Plus NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, CMR, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" -WD40EFPX



If you can afford it that would be a great addition to your PC for file storage .. the link I gave you above though is acting kind of strange for me, if it doesn't show it for $75 sold and shipped by amazon do a search for the model number WD40EFPX on amazon and it should pop up



A bit of history on the WD Red drives which won't affect you at all as a desktop user .. there was a scandal because WD gave out misinformation on the properties of the drives as far as their ability to handle backups of computer data in business type environments if I understand correctly and WD never recovered from the blow to their reputation for the WD Red brand thus the lower prices or so I'm guessing... but again I've been using the 2 TB version of that exact same drive for years now on my desktop with no problems.



Alternately for faster performance but a smaller (1 TB instead of 4 TB ) drive you could buy the crucial mx500 drive the OP listed.. I have them as the Windows/C drive in three desktop PC's and they've been working great for years now... that was back before the crazy low drop on hard drive prices in general so you're better off with the m2 drive for $55 instead as your windows drive ... if you have the budget grab two of them and make the other m2 drive a drive for gaming if you're a gamer ...