Black Friday weekend is finally here, but don’t worry, the hot deals will continue through to Cyber Monday. That means there are veritable terabytes of super deals on SSDs of all types and sizes. Whether you’re dipping your toes into the solid state scene with a small sub-$100 unit, or going whole-hog with an 8TB beast, we’ve got the deals that can get you set up.
NVMe SSDs are the unit of choice these days, offering performance that exceeds that of their SATA counterparts, and this is a great time to upgrade if you’re looking for a serious speed boost. You’ll want to check your motherboard specs to ensure it supports the technology—once you’ve got that taken care of, you’ll find some great deals in the list below.
That’s not to suggest that SATA SSDs are to be avoided. NVMe units are faster than SATA drives, and not just in load times—general Windows usage will be smoother across the board—but both types absolutely blow conventional hard drives out of the water. One option to consider is to upgrade to an NVMe SSD as your main boot drive and then use your old SSD—or a higher-capacity, new SATA SSD—for storing your Steam library and whatever else you like to keep kicking around. Whatever path you choose to follow, SSD storage has never been cheaper, which makes this a great time to go for a big upgrade.
Remember size isn’t the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to storage. With the next-gen consoles, both launching with speedy PCIe 4.0 SSDs at their heart, performance will be front and center in the minds of game developers moving forward. Over the next few years, we’re going to see speedy NVMe SSDs becoming the default, and that push for faster performance should benefit PCs as well as consoles. Vast open-world games with basically no loading times—sounds pretty good, right?
Here are the best SSD deals:
Where are the best Black Friday SSD deals?
In the US:
In the UK:
Black Friday NVMe SSD deals
Our magic price searching bots are all over the web, tracking down the best prices all the time. That means this list will be regularly curated multiple times each day.
Black Friday SATA SSD deals
Our magic price searching bots are all over the web, tracking down the best prices all the time. That means this list will be regularly curated multiple times each day.
Black Friday External SSD deals
Our magic price searching bots are all over the web, tracking down the best prices all the time. That means this list will be regularly curated multiple times each day.
Black Friday External HDD deals
What should I look out for in a Black Friday SSD deal?
The main things to watch out for are the same for Black Friday SSD deals as with any other technology bargain hunting you do around this November period. Go in there with an idea of what you want, and above all, what you need. It’s easy to get carried away at this time of year, but if you have a notion of how much you want to spend and what sort of SSD you’re after, you’ll be in good stead.
Capacity is a good starting point, and at the moment, we’re looking at some excellent 1TB offers, but a 512GB SSD will still afford you a lot of speed storage for a boot drive, with enough space for your most regularly played games. I mean, they’re not all Call of Duty, right?
Then think about the interface. Chances are, if you’re rocking a PC of the last five years, you’ll have an M.2 slot in your motherboard with NVMe support. However, it’s worth digging into the specifics of your motherboard to make sure that it can definitely support booting from such drives as not all can. Check out the manufacturer’s pages and maybe forums too.
If you’re considering making the switch to an AMD Zen 2 or Zen 3 processor and X570 or B550 chipsets, then there you also have a decision to make regarding PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The same’s true if you pick up an Intel Rocket Lake CPU with a Z590 motherboard. PCIe 4.0 is the newer standard, with the higher bandwidth, but is backward compatible with older boards. That means you can buy the latest SSDs now, and they’ll still be lightning-fast in your existing setup, just not to the full extent you’ll see when you do make the upgrade.
That said, PCIe 3.0 drives are still incredibly speedy compared to anything that has come before, so you’ll be in a great place with any high-performance NVMe SSD purchase.
There are some things to look out for, however. Some budget PCIe 3.0 drives only operate at x2 speed, which means they’re half as fast as the standard x4 NVMe SSDs. It’s also worth ensuring your M.2 SSD actually is an NVMe drive. There are some M.2 SSDs that still operate over the SATA interface and can only reach a maximum theoretical speed of 600MB/s, while the theoretical maximum of an x4 PCIe 3.0 interface is 4,000MB/s.
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