If you’ve been waiting for Amazon Prime Day 2024 to shop for a new storage drive, your patience is already paying off. Select SSDs from popular manufacturers have already reached low or all-time low prices, and so we’ve picked the best of the bunch for common capacities like 1TB and 2TB.
As we get closer to July 16 (when Prime Day 2024 officially starts), we may see more discounts appear… but it’s possible the sales you’ll see below could sell out between now and then. If you see something you like, don’t hesitate to buy it.
Take it from me—I’ve been tracking SSD and storage deals for well over a decade, and have been covering them for PCWorld since 2016. The list you’ll see below considers not just capacity and speed, but also online reviews from tech sites like ours (when available), user feedback, and price history. That last point is especially important, as SSD prices have been rising since last fall.
Read on for the best SSD & storage bargains, and check out our Prime Day 2024 deals hub for fantastic sales in other tech categories.
With SSD prices having steadily risen since last fall, the best prices now won’t match historical all-time lows. However, they will be the steepest discounts we’ve seen since the cost climb. The Samsung 990 EVO discount feels particularly juicy, given how relatively new this Gen 5 drive is.
Sales on external drives are starting slower in the lead up to Prime Day 2024, but this deal from venerable manufacturer SK Hynix is a head-turner. When we reviewed it last year, it earned a 4.5 star rating for its blistering speed and compact size—and that was at full price.
The balance between demand and supply has shifted—with fewer drives on the market, prices have been drifting up since last fall. (Black Friday 2023 was the beginning of the golden era’s end.) The deals picked for this roundup may not always match those incredible 2023 prices, but they do hit a low for the period since the cost increases.
Yes, but only to a point. Major manufacturers are generally reliable—think Samsung, Crucial, Western Digital (aka WD), SK Hynix, Corsair, Kingston, and even newer players like TeamGroup and Solidigm. Outside of that, you may be playing a bit fast and loose with your data’s longevity.
However, everyone has that one horror story about a hard-disk drive that failed, and why they’ll never use, say, WD or Crucial again. That’s less commonly a manufacturing error, and more so a matter of luck. No drive is guaranteed to meet its life expectancy, which is why you should perform regular backups.
SSDs are faster and take less room in a PC than a hard-disk drive (HDD), which gives them a strong advantage. If you only have one storage drive in your PC, it should ideally be an SSD so you get faster boot times and quicker access to your files. A HDD as your primary drive will feel much slower.
But HDDs still have their advantages. First, they’re much cheaper. The going price of a 2TB HDD is about the same as the sale price for a 1TB SSD. You also can get them in higher capacities than SSDs. If you work with huge files, you can pick up an 18TB or 20TB HDD (and as mentioned, since HDD cost less, you’ll spend as much or even less as a 4TB SSD). If you need secondary storage and you don’t need it to be fast, HDDs are a fantastic option.
Here’s the guideline we use for picking deals: First, it should be for an SSD that performs well (or in select cases, performs well for its MSRP), and is a reasonable price when not on sale. The discount should also be significant for that particular model. Ex: For SSDs that almost never go on sale, a reduction of $5 to $10 is already hefty. For others, that might be closer to $20 to $30.
In other words, expect to pick up high-performing drives at an all-time low (or very close to that) during Prime Day. Ignore the options that don’t meet this criteria.
