Best Holiday SSD and Hard Drive Deals 2024

1 week ago 3

Best Holiday SSD and Hard Drive Deals

Upgrading your computer's SSD is a game-changer, giving you more performance, more capacity, or both. Whether it's picking up a speedy new boot drive or adding secondary storage that increases your capacity, you can find some amazing holiday deals on the best SSDs.

Some of the best times to find a bargain storage upgrade for your PC or laptop are during sales events, but we do see discounts outside of these peak trading extravaganzas. We've seen the prices of storage creep up steadily the last year, and probably will never see the lows of 2023, but there are still relative bargains to be had. Recently we've seen large 8TB SSDs like the WD Black SN850X fall to $549 and our favorite Samsung 990 Pro 4TB hit $270. Some of the best-value SSDs are in the 2TB range with prices starting from as low as $89 for Silicon Power's UD90.

Be alert when looking at SSDs as not every drive is born equal and worthy of your money or a place of honor in your PC. Differences in controllers, QLC, or TLC NAND, with or without DRAM can all affect the performance of your drive. That's why we've listed the best SSD deals below. Many of these drives are listed on our SSD Benchmark hierarchy so you can see how they stack up to the competition. You can also track the latest SSD prices on all the key drives, even if they are not on sale.

Best SSD Deals

Best External SSD / HDD / NAS Deals

SSD Deals: What to Look For

  • SATA or NVMe: SSDs either use the SATA or NVMe interface, with the latter being as much as six times faster (or more). All 2.5-inch drives are SATA, but M.2 drives could be either NVMe or SATA interface, though the latter is now rare. If you have a desktop or laptop that was built in the last 5 years, it almost certainly supports NVMe, which is faster. As SATA is old news, most of the best SSD deals are on NVMe drives.
  • 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. You won't find that many deals on 2.5-inch drives, but they can be useful for bulk storage as many motherboards have a ton of SATA ports but only two M.2 slots.
  • PCIe 3, 4 or 5: If you're buying an NVMe SSD, you can choose among PCIe 3, 4 or 5 interfaces with speeds increasing from a maximum of around 3,500 MBps sequential reads and writes to 8,000 MBps and 14,000 MBps. At this point, PCIe 4 drives are mainstream and offer the best value. PCIe 5 drives are extraordinarily expensive, require a newer-gen platform that supports them, and also generate a fair amount of heat. We're seeing the best SSD deals on PCIe 4 drives which is the best standard for most people.
  • Capacity: 2TB seems to be the sweet spot for price and performance, with decent 2TB, PCIe 4 NVMe drives going for around $89 or less and high-performance ones in the sub $170 range. If you can splurge, go for a 4TB drive, which could cost anywhere from $150 for a low-end drive, up to $300 for a high-end one. If you really need to save money, a decent 1TB drive can cost $70 or less. However, the top SSD deals this year are definitely on 2 and 4TB capacities.

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Stewart Bendle is a deals and coupon writer at Tom's Hardware. A firm believer in “Bang for the buck” Stewart likes to research the best prices and coupon codes for hardware and build PCs that have a great price for performance ratio.

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