New customers at Micro Center can get a 256GB SSD for free

Brick-and-mortar locations of MicroCenter are participating in a promotion that gives first-time buyers the opportunity to receive a free Inland 256GB Professional or Platinum SATA 3 solid state drive (SSD). There is no bureaucratic red tape, and you can take advantage of this deal right up until the stocks are out. Simply putting your signature on the provided form will earn you a coupon that can be used toward the purchase of one of the two available SSDs. These days, 256 gigabytes of storage space is not a lot, especially for 2.5-inch SATA solid state drives (SSDs) like the one that MicroCenter is selling.

Despite this, they continue to be completely acceptable choices for use as boot drives in low-cost computer builds. Provided you want an additional 256 GB of storage capacity, you may also put one of these into your tower provided you have the room for it. This will give you a total of 512 GB of storage space. Converting the disk into an external drive by using a USB enclosure is potentially the most effective solution of all the options available. These days, enclosures can be purchased for as little as ten dollars on Amazon (link opens in new tab), and when used in conjunction with a SATA 3 solid-state drive (SSD), you can achieve a storage speed of up to 520 megabytes per second in a portable form factor.

This is something that cannot be stated of all USB 3.0 or even 3.1 USB thumb drives. MicroCenter is currently carrying 256GB 3D TLC NAND flash variants of the Inland Professional and Platinum SATA solid state drives (SSDs). These SSDs have read speeds of up to 520MBps and write speeds of up to 430MBps respectively. The professional edition has a capacity of 170 terabytes of writes (TBW), 55,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for random reads of 4k data, and 50,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) for random writes of 4k data. The Platinum edition features an endurance of 150 TBW as well as 40,000 IOPS of read and write performance for random 4k data.