When looking for a good price on solid state hard drives, some of the key elements to consider are storage size, brand, performance, reliability, and of course price. Some of the best cheap SSD drives available on the market can be easily searched for and compared at Amazon.

SanDisk makes a 480 GB SATA drive called the “Ultra II”. It is an SSD and can read up to 550MB per second. While selling for north of a hundred dollars, this is a fairly large drive with a high speed SATA III connection, so the steeper price ends up being a no-brainer for anyone looking for an upgrade to their PC. Those with aging computers that don’t want to replace their whole system can notice a significant improvement with this hard drive in place of their older one, especially those on a budget. A low heat signature and almost no vibration from this solid state drive improves the usability factor immensely.

Some of the cheap SSD drives from Seagate include the 500 GB Momentus XT, which is really more of a hybrid drive. At a much lower cost than the SanDisk the Seagate drive also features a performance customization process called “Adaptive Memory” that aligns performance with user patterns to maximize heavy duty operations when truly needed for an overall improved system response. Operates quietly with a minimal hum and is available at an affordable price.

Samsung makes the 850 EVO, which at 250 GB is much smaller in storage capacity than the two listed above, but makes up for it in performance, security and dependability. What sets this Samsung drive apart is the ability to support hardware encryption. You can now work on confidential processes and documents worry-free. The fact that this functionality works right of the box is an added benefit that cannot be overlooked.

Consider upgrading the hard disk on your aging computer today with one of these cheap SSD drives and you can extend the useful life of your machine for years at a minimal cost.