Amazon Prime Big Deal Days is here (aka October Prime Day), and among the thousands of discounted products, you can find juicy sale prices on SSDs and external storage. You can find options in both in HDD and SSD flavors, as well as a range of different capacities from 500GB to 20TB—good options.
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 and storage bargains, and check out our Prime Big Deal Days 2024 deals hub for fantastic sales in other tech categories. You may also be interested in our top picks for the best SSDs of 2024 and the best external drives of 2024.
If you need to expand your storage without breaking the bank, TeamGroup’s Vulcan Z line is a solid choice. This form factor for SATA drives is great for games, photos, and other files that benefit from a boost from HDD speeds but don’t justify the NVMe SSD premium. Need more space? The 4TB version of Samsung’s well-regarded 870 Evo is at one of its lowest prices this year.
Since SSD prices have risen over the last year, the best prices now don’t match historical all-time lows, especially on internal M.2 SSDs. But you can still find decent prices, like on the large-capacity version of the speedy Samsung 990 Pro, as well as Corsair’s Steam Deck–sized drive. Don’t need a lot of space, nor the absolute fastest speed? Check out the 500GB Western Digital Blue SN580, down to an all-time low price.
Whether it’s extreme speed or capacity that you need, you can find good deals on external drives right now. Samsung’s popular (and fast) T7 and its rugged T7 Shield variant are both close to their all-time low prices, as is the massive 20TB version of WD’s Elements desktop HDD. But the real scene-stealer is the SK Hynix Beetle X31, which scored a 4.5 out of 5 in our review—not only is it blazing fast, its price has dropped to a new all-time low.
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 edge. 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 a Prime Day sale. Ignore the options that don’t meet this criteria.
