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Black Friday SSD deals: the fastest PC storage for the best price

November 25, 2020

Looking for a bargain Black Friday SSD deal is one of the easiest ways to give your PC a major speed boost. And we're not just talking game loads here, either, general Windows use will be a whole lot slicker with a good SSD. Maybe your PC is already running on one, but these days we could all use a little more SSD storage. An extra terabyte sure isn't going to boost your framerate in Call of Duty, but it'll at least mean you can fit the damned thing alongside the rest of your game library.

The Best Black Friday SSD Deals

Jump straight to the deals you want...
1. NVMe SSD deals
2. SATA SSD deals
3. External SSD deals

Right now Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the mightiest of all the mighty storage hogs on PC right now, clocking in at 231GB. That's big enough that a 256GB boot drive simply wouldn't have enough space for it and a simple Windows installation. But there are loads of games that will use up 20 or even 50GB of space. Thankfully, SSD storage has never been cheaper.

With a Black Friday SSD deal, you can upgrade to a faster SSD than what you already have, or simply add a big chunk of game storage for a little cash.

Remember that size isn't the be-all-and-end-all. With the next-gen consoles both launching with speedy SSDs at their heart, performance is going to be front and center in the minds of game developers moving forward. Over the next few years we're going to see 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 deals we've found so far.

Black Friday NVMe SSD deals

Adata XPG SX8200 Pro | 512GB | PCIe 3.0 | $129.99 $62.99 at Amazon (save $67)
 Adata might not be a fashionable name in solid state storage but the XPG SX8200 Pro is a quality NVMe SSD, with impressive read/write performance not far off the big bois. And it manages to offer that performance with an impressively svelte pricetag too, especially when on offer at under half price.View Deal

Western Digital WD_Black SN750 | 500GB | PCIe 3.0 | $62.99 at Amazon
 Western Digital came late to the SSD game, despite being a huge name in the hard drive market, but the SN750 appeared with its own controller and performance to match the might of Samsung's NVMe SSDs. It's still up there, and this 500GB version is a great little drive for this price.View Deal

Samsung 970 EVO SSD | 500GB | PCIe 3.0 | $99.99 $59.99 at Amazon (38% off)
 You'd probably want a 1TB drive, but if you can't stretch that far a 500GB NVMe drive is still absolutely better than not having one. Especially when it's a speedy Samsung offering. This is a record low price for a half terabyte drive and it's not really that much slower than the slightly updated EVO Plus version.View Deal

Samsung 970 EVO Plus | 500GB| PCIe 3.0 | $129.99 $79.99 at Amazon (save $50)
 We may be getting near the point where we regularly recommend a 1TB NVMe SSD as the baseline for what you should be having as a boot drive in your gaming rig, but for right now, having a speedy 500GB 970 EVO Plus on your side will do just fine. That will make Windows feel zippy, as well as your most oft-played games.View Deal

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 a Samsung version 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 P2 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

WD Black SN750 SSD | 1TB | PCIe 3.0 | $249.99 $134.99 at Amazon (save $115)
 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

Samsung 970 EVO Plus | 1TB | PCIe 3.0 | $249.99 $149.99 at Amazon (save $100)
 While we're still waiting for the newer PCIe 4.0 interface to become ubiquitous speedy PCIe 3.0 SSDs, such as this excellent Samsung 970 EVO Plus, are still absolutely worth your money. For under $150 this is a good price for a 1TB NVMe SSD, though you may find lesser-known brands hitting $120-odd around Black Friday.View Deal

Corsair MP400 | 1TB | PCIe 3.0 | $136.99 $114.99 at Newegg (save $22)
 As a member of the QLC brigade this Corsair PCIe 3.0 drive can't quite muster the write performance of something like Samsung or WD's finest, but this is still decent value for 1TB of SSD storage with performance way ahead of an equivalent SATA drive.View Deal

Mushkin Enhanced Pilot-E | 2TB | PCIe 3.0 | $309.99 $219.99 at Newegg (save $90)
 The price of NVMe drives is at a spectacularly low level right now, to the point where a seriously quick 2TB drive like this is only a shade over $200. That, together with its competitive read/write speed, makes this a rather desirable little slice of silicon to house your precious game data.View Deal

Black Friday SATA SSD deals

Samsung SSD 860 EVO | 500GB | $89.99 $53.99 at Amazon (save $36)
 This 500GB version of the mighty Samsung 860 EVO will still deliver plenty of PC storage capacity for the discerning gamer, with performance ahead of anything your ol' spinner platter hard drive could dream of hitting. Though it is worth noting that you will find NVMe options for not a whole lot more if your system is compatible.
 View Deal

Samsung SSD 860 EVO | 1TB | $199.99 $99.99 at Amazon (save $100)
 If you are after some solid solid state storage options then the classic 860 EVO is one of the best SATA drives you can buy. Samsung is always reliable in the SSD world now, and at half price this 1TB SATA drive is outstanding value as either the base for your whole rig or just some speedy secondary Steam library storage.
 View Deal

Black Friday External SSD deals

Samsung X5 | 2TB | Thunderbolt 3 | $699.99 $549.99 at Amazon (save $150)
Yeah, that is a lot of money to drop on some external SSD storage, but look, that's 2TB of NVMe-class data space. For any professional working on large data sets out in the field, who needs to transfer that stuff around, then spending big on a high-capacity SSD makes a lot of sense. And with $150 off the X5 is great on those counts.View Deal

SanDisk Extreme | 500GB | $97.38 $94.99 at Amazon (save 2%)
 This isn't one of those products we're highlighting because it's an incredible saving, but the SanDisk Extreme portable SSD is a rugged, reliable drive that we're happy to recommend because it's a quality product. $95 isn't a stellar discount, but it's still absolutely a fair price for this SSD.View Deal

Crucial X8 | 1TB | $189.95 $129.99 at Amazon (save $59.96)
 What's better than external storage? Superfast external storage, that's what. And it doesn't get much faster than this chunk of aluminum and silicon—we're talking transfer rates up to 1050MB/s here. It also happens to be rugged enough to take out into the big outdoors with you. View Deal

SanDisk Extreme | 1TB | $249.99 $159.99 at Amazon (save $90)
 External SSDs are becoming more and more important with the release of the next-gen consoles, but they're also vital for the professional PC crowd too. Having a rugged drive such as this SanDisk, with this level of performance, means working with large data sizes on the go is far easier.View Deal

What to look out for in a Black Friday SSD

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 have a 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. It's worth digging into the specifics of your motherboard, however, 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 one of the latest AMD processors and 570 or 550 chipsets, then there you also have a decision to make regarding PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0 SSDs. PCIe 4.0 is the newer standard, with the higher bandwidth, but is backwards compatible with older boards too. That means you can buy the latest SSDs now and they'll still be lightning fast in your existing setup, just not at 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 mean 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 therefore can only reach a maximum theoretical speed of 600MB/s, while the theoretical maximum of a x4 PCIe 3.0 interface is 4,000MB/s.



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