Whether it’s picking up a speedy new boot drive (perhaps one of the best SSDs) or adding secondary storage that increases your capacity, this Black Friday deals season is a particularly good time to buy a new SSD or HDD.
Not only are retailers eager to clear out inventory this holiday season, but we also see prices on flash memory falling. The result: some really strong savings on solid state drives.
It’s also a good time to look for savings on the best external drives you can use for backup or for transferring data between all your devices. If you don’t already have a large external hard drive or SSD, you really should get one in order to do full system backups or just keep your important files somewhere besides the cloud.
Below, we’ve listed the best SSD and hard drive deals that are available from major retailers such as Amazon and Newegg. We’re also tracking the best monitor deals, best CPU deals, best gaming laptop deals, best 3D printer deals and the Best PC hardware deals overall.
Quick Links: SSD Deals
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SSD Deals: What to Look For
2.5-inch or M.2: Most internal SSDs are either 2.5-inch or M.2 form factor. 2.5-inch drives connect to SATA ports and can replace old-school mechanical hard drives. M.2 drives look like RAM sticks and plug into dedicated M.2 ports.
SATA or NVMe: SSDs either use the SATA or NVMe interface, with the latter being as much as six times faster (or more). However, you need to know which your PC supports. All 2.5-inch drives are SATA, but M.2 drives could be either NVMe or SATA interface, though the latter is now rare.
Capacity: 1TB seems to be the sweet spot for price and performance, with decent NVMe drives going for around $100 or less and high-performance ones in the sub $150 range. You can save money with a 512GB drive or, for an older PC with limited needs, a 256GB unit can be extremely cheap.