I've been a huge fan of SSDs ever since I started looking into them back in 2008. The impact to the overall PC user experience is nothing short of tremendous. Honestly, whenever I use a system without an SSD I end up frustrated at just how slow it feels. I said it back in '08 and it's just as true today: moving to an SSD is the single biggest upgrade you can do for your machine. With all of that said, I'm very excited about today's continuation of our Holiday 2013 giveaway series. Crucial.com is providing us with two M500 SSDs to give away.

The M500 uses a Marvell 88SS9187 controller paired with Crucial's own firmware. The NAND comes courtesy of Crucial's parent company, Micron, and ships in a very unique 128Gbit configuration. The result is one of the best values in MLC SSDs, particularly at the highest 960GB capacity. The M500's performance is competitive, and it remains one of the only drives that supports Microsoft's eDrive standard. The M500's eDrive support allows Windows 8 users (on a properly enabled system) to allow Bitlocker to leverage the drive's hardware encryption engine rather than doing it all in software. The end result is virtually no additional CPU overhead for enabling Bitlocker in Windows 8, something you can't do without eDrive support.

Crucial.com sent us two high-capacity drives: a 480GB drive and a 960GB drive. We'll be drawing two winners at random, who will receive either a 480GB drive or a 960GB drive (prize distribution will also be at random). We'll be accepting entries until 12/12 at 9AM ET. To enter just leave a comment below (please only post once) and make sure you're a US resident with a US mailing address. For all entry details check out our official terms below. Good luck!