Has there ever been a better time to buy an SSD than right now?
From byte-breakingly big games to undeniably cheap NAND, this might be the single best moment to buy a new SSD.
There's probably never been a better time to purchase an SSD than right now, right in this moment. This very Black Friday. I don't even think that's the four cups of coffee talking, either. Without a doubt, SSDs have become the mainstream in 2020, but that's been obvious for a while, what what we're now seeing now are some incredibly performant and capacious SSDs available for far less than you'd have imagined in even your wildest dreams just a few years back.
Black Friday deals
Black Friday 2020 deals: the place to go for the all the best Black Friday bargains.
We've long seen discounts on great SATA drives and the like, and even many slower PCIe 3.0 drives that aren't quite up to par with the very best, dabbling in Black Friday SSD discounts in the past, but this year we're seeing even the best and brightest SSDs from the most recognisable brands dropping in price. And none too soon either.
We're seeing all sorts of SSDs getting their prices chopped right now for Black Friday. Even Samsung's 980 Pro, the fastest drive you can actually buy, was included however briefly. That's a PCIe 4.0 drive that only properly launched in September, and one of the few next-gen drives able to make good use of the PCIe 4.0 interconnect support on AMD's Ryzen 5000 processors and X570 and B550 motherboards. That's unfortunately slipped off the grid again now, but 10s more SSD deals have taken its place.
It's a great time to pick up an SSD for two reasons, in fact: The first is obviously that it's Black Friday and they're cheap. The second, though, is that games are slowly looking like they'll require faster and faster storage—and more of it too. Developers, consoles—they're all at it with the rapid storage that only a PCIe SSD can offer.
If you're still rocking a HDD, then you'll want a speedy storage drive to move your OS on to. You can still keep that HDD around for extra capacity after the fact, too, so you'll lose nothing in the process. If you're already rocking solid-state in your gaming PC, then perhaps it's more space for the latest games you desire. That's easy enough to find right now too.
WD Black SN750 SSD | 1TB | PCIe 3.0 | $234.99 $115.99 at Best Buy (save $119)
This 1TB PCIe SSD will deliver high-end storage performance, with a serious gobbet of game storing capacity. It's not going to hit the heights of PCIe 4.0 drives, but you'll struggle to find a comparative option with the space on offer to this WD SSD.View Deal
WD Black SN750 SSD | 2TB | PCIe 3.0 | $509.99 $274.99 at Best Buy (save $235)
The same as above but *even bigger*.View Deal
Case in point: Here's WD's 1TB Black SN750 SSD going for $115.99—this was competing with the very best from Samsung not that long ago, and you can now get a lot of NAND for $144 off its original price. The 2TB drive, too, is perhaps even more indicative of the NAND price crash that happen many moons ago now but that has been seeing a gradual decline in SSD prices ever since. The 2TB SN750 has dropped from $509.99 to $274.99.
That's not some made up retail price, either. These high capacity SSDs really were going for upwards of at least $400 for a long while there, with very little sign of price reductions anytime soon.
If memory serves it was roughly 2017/2018 when prices were soaring. That was largely due to an incredibly cushy market for NAND manufacturers at the time, many of whom were finding that their chips were subject to incredible demand from everything from smartphones and tablets to laptops and PCs. And cars. And TVs. And you get the point. Everyone wanted NAND chips (and DRAM for that matter) and only a few people were able to make it.
But then came the eventual crash—a competitive market, a surplus in NAND chips, there were a multitude of factors that led to the inevitable price drop that occurs with near-enough any mass produced tech. That's all to our benefit, however, as it also meant SSDs built with said NAND flash chips were on a steady price decline, in a way culminating in the cheap SSD deals we're seeing in this moment.
Crucial P1 | 1TB | PCIe 3.0 | $104.99 $93.99 at Amazon (10% off)
Let's be clear, while it is an NVMe SSD, the Crucial P1 is not in the same league as the WD at just 2,400MB/s seq. read and 1,900MB/s seq. write. But that said it's still hugely quicker than any SATA drive any manufacturer can offer. And at under $100 it's a whole lot of speedy storage for not a whole lot of actual cash.View Deal
Crucial P5 | 1TB | PCIe 3.0 | $149.99 $119.99 at Amazon (20% off)
There's a lot to love about the cheaper P1 model above, but it can't hold a candle to the P5. This is Crucial's fastest consumer NVMe drive today with seq. read speeds of 3,400MB/s and seq. write of up to 3,000MB/s. That puts it right up there at the top-end of PCIe 3.0 drives today, and perfect for your operating system, applications, and games.View Deal
Now the price per gigabyte for an SSD has come crashing down to Earth. Take that WD SN750 for example, far from even the cheapest around. In fact the cheapest we recommend for 1TB today is the Crucial P1 at $93.99—I'm weak at the knees just thinking about it.
But that aforementioned WD drive is just $0.12/GB. HDDs have dropped down into low single-digits now, but that super-fast, high-performance, reliable SSD isn't far off. And compare that to a good drive from 2017, where you could be looking at around $0.30/GB. I mean, we all got excited when SSDs dropped down to the $0.50/GB mark.
It's pretty astounding when you think about it, and this weekend only furthers massive discounts that have been years in the making.
Check out our best Black Friday SSD deals hub for all those we've spotted so far, or just browse the list below from across the web. If next year's games are only going to make today's look small by comparison, it's a good time to upgrade.