Hi all, new to the forum.
I second the vote for Crucial MX they work fine. But as folks mentioned pretty much anything will do.
One gotcha on an old system could be memory capacity. If you are running 8 or 16gb of RAM you probably won’t need much page file activity. Though google Chrome and modern browsers can chew up RAM pretty quick so depending on what you are doing 8GB may not be enough.
If this is an OS drive you may want to consider paying a bit more for an MLC SSD since it will have better overall endurance. Especially if you are running say, 4GB of RAM. Paging to an MLC drive instead of TLC won’t wear the drive out as fast. Oh also PSA remember to disable the hibernation file on the OS install to reclaim some disk space, assuming you don’t need to hibernate a desktop.
A Samsung 860 pro would do it. There is a 250gb one on newegg for 90 bucks as of now.
I don’t see any Mushkin MLC drives but there were some out there not too long ago.
For reference:
SLC - 1 Bit per cell. Fast, long write endurance, expensive. Very few drives purely use this nowadays.
MLC- 2 Bits per cell slower, less write endurance, less costly, getting harder to find.
TLC - 3 Bits per cell, even less endurance, less cost, but one of the most common out there
QLC - 4 bits per cell, you get the idea, same as above. Modern Intel QLC drives often have an SLC cache to balance performance. New kids on the block.
In MLC the M stands for Multi which means 2 - thanks marketing guys, not confusing at all! Samsung has made things more complicated in the TLC EVO drives they call it 3-bit MLC and Pro is 2-bit MLC or plain old MLC. They are the only ones doing this as far as I am aware.
Only bringing this up because a friend of mine was asking how to breathe new life into an old laptop his folks had because it was very old and if they need virtual memory an MLC drive may give the folks an extra year or two over the TLC, depending on paging and hibernation use. But they are less and less common and TLC is fine in most case so it’s really a matter of preference.
Honestly, any sata drive will do. My preference is always new because you may not know how much was written to a used drive and new comes with warranty.