Crucial M500 960GB 2.5-inch Solid State Drive $380 shipped (orig. $472)

Newegg is offering the Crucial M500 960GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter/spacer) Internal Solid State Drive (CT960M500SSD1) for $409.99. But using code EMCWPHP22 will drop your total down to $379.99 shipped. That’s $92 under the original listing, $70 under Crucial direct, $47 under Amazon and matching the lowest 1TB SSD internal drive price we’ve seen.

Features:

• 500 MB/s sequential reads, 400 MB/s sequential writes, 80k random reads, 80k random writes
• Ample storage: available in capacities up to terabyte-class
• Includes top-level hardware encryption technology, transformative performance: with dramatically faster than a hard drive
• Nearly instantaneous boot times
• Three-year limited warranty

It has received an impressive 4.6/5 star rating from 1,400 Amazon reviewers. You can use Seagate’s highly rated Thunderbolt sled to create a speedy portable solid state drive.

More from Crucial:

Form Factor/Type – The physical size of the hardware components in your system. For example, the form factor for an SSD might be 2.5 inches or 1.8 inches, which tells you the dimensions of the SSD.

Interface – An interface is the means by which two independent systems communicate. For SSDs, the interface refers to a connector that plugs your SSD into your computer so it can receive power or data.

Read – In computer terms, a “read” refers to accessing a piece of data from a storage device or memory.

SATA – Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. It’s a type of interface that connects a storage device or optical drive to your computer’s motherboard—think of it like an umbilical cord because it allows data to flow between the two. SATA is measured by how fast data transfers to/from the device. There are three SATA speeds, SATA I (1.5Gb/s), SATA II (3.0Gb/s) and SATA III (6.0Gb/s).

Write – In computer terms, “write” refers to how quickly a piece of data can be saved to a storage device (saving a document is an example of a write function).