MSI is giving away 500GB spinning SATA drives with barebones systems in 2024

Popular PCs and components maker MSI has a curious new promotion for buyers of its barebones PC kits. The firm is attempting to lure budget buyers by offering to bundle a free 500GB hard disk drive (HDD) with its chassis, motherboard, and PSU combos. Who is going to be drawn in with the offer of a half terabyte of spinning rust in 2024?

The 500GB SATA drive is offered with a range of Intel and AMD barebone machines priced from $180 to $340. The lowest cost machine being the MAG Kit Intel H610 Barebone System based around the PRO H610M-G WIFI DDR4 motherboard, CHASSIS MAG FORGE 112R case and a MAG A650BN 650W PSU. You’ll need to bring your own DDR4 RAM and an Intel CPU from the 12th to 14th gen, but at least you’ve got a drive to boot from, if that’s one of your concerns. Personally, we’d utilize the onboard M.2 slot, or use a SATA SSD with the four SATA ports.

At the top end of the barebones range is the MPG Kit Intel Z790 Barebone System which is based around a Z790 GAMING PLUS WIFI motherboard for Intel 12 to 14th gen CPUs and DDR 5 RAM. We get a GUNGNIR 210R gaming case and an AG A850GL PCIE5 850W PSU. Lets not forget that we get to pair this beast of a barebones unit with our free 500GB drive!

According to MSI, “Your PC, Your Rules!” My personal rule since the Haswell era has been never to fit any HDDs in my desktops, and to upgrade any older device with an SSD. It was such a relief to get rid of the last HDD from my DIY desktop, maybe a decade ago, when I fitted a decent-capacity SSD to partner with my boot SSD. The last mechanical drive I had spoiled the almost silent performance I enjoyed with my cool running Haswell T-series chip and good-mannered Sapphire Radeon. Working on a nearly silent system into the small hours, the seemingly random ticking, clicking, and spinning up of the hard disk platters was, of course, unwelcome.

In addition to the spectre of irksome mechanical noise, consumer HDDs like the Seagate freebie that MSI is offering aren’t great performers. Some might even see the 500GB Seagate Barracuda 2.5-inch drive as a waste of a SATA port, offering about half the transfer speed of a cheap 2.5-inch SATA SSD if you are lucky, and being far less responsive due to the mechanical technology’s access times.

The utility value of a storage device with 500GB capacity is also diminishing, fast. That’s only enough for two modern PC titles like CoD: Modern Warfare III and God of War: Ragnarok if you want to put these titles on a spinning drive for some reason. More and more titles (and applications) require SSDs as a minimum or recommended specification. One of the last remaining advantages of HDDs, their affordability in far higher capacities than SSDs, simply doesn’t apply here.

This offer from MSI gave some of the team the opportunity to reminisce about the days when owning a system with an HDD of this size would make friends and colleagues green with envy.  Some of the older Tom’s Hardware editors recall HDDs that offered just 10MB of storage and were built like bricks. We are also aware of older and much physically larger devices – with similarly meagre capacities – used by mainframe systems of old.

MSI’s free 500GB HDD offer isn’t a great deal. If you want the best deals on storage, we have a page dedicated to the best SSDs. But this paltry 500GB of spinning rust could be a useful option for builders on a budget, who just need to get a machine up and running. With 1TB NVMe drives going for very little money, you’d be best pushing your budget a little further for faster and double the storage.