Price change: ➖
WD Black SN850X | 1 TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7,300 MB/s read | 6,300 MB/s write | $93.99 $79.99 at Amazon (save $14)
This is still our favorite SSD for gaming, despite the strong competition and volatile prices. Unlike the cheaper SN770, the SN850X encapsulates the best PCIe 4.0 offers in terms of performance (check out our review). That makes it a great fit for a boot drive with space to spare for your game library, which is exactly what I need from a new NVMe drive.
Price check: Best Buy $129.99 | Newegg $79.99View Deal
The time has once again come for a Black Friday SSD deal to hopefully help me survive another year in the neverending war of attrition between the file size of my favorite games and the storage space in my PC. This year I'm looking at my game library drive with dread as I total up the nearly 700GB worth of games I was really hoping to play this holiday. Unlike in past years when I would be eyeing a 512GB drive and counting my pennies, this year I think I'll score a roomy new NVMe for under $100.
???? We're curating the best Black Friday PC gaming deals right here ????
Here's my dilemma, and tell me if you can relate: I played 80 hours of Baldur's Gate 3 last year and only reached act two and then at some point this year had to uninstall it to make room for newer games. Red Dead Redemption 2 got that same axe last year when I sacrificed it to my Diablo 4 installation. It turns out I just really like big games.
Now I'm looking from my game library to my NVMe drive, trying to figure out what's going to give. Because I've got a lot of games I want to play this holiday break. If I reinstall Baldur's Gate 3 to finish my playthrough, reinstall RDR2 so I can finally play that campaign instead of tooling around in RDO, reinstall Elden Ring (which I also didn't beat), and then also toss in Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth that I didn't play yet, Metaphor: ReFantazio that everyone swears to me is amazing, Dragon's Dogma 2 that I barely touched in March, and Path of Exile 2 coming up next week we're looking at a grand total of 692 GB of storage space that I need to find.
Now that could all fit on a 1TB drive that's also my boot drive if I wanted it to. Since our favorite WD Black SN850X drive up there is down to $80 right now that's a tidy way to either start a fresh PC build with room for your current library and space to expand or add it in as a secondary drive and move your game library over to it.
The truth is that I actually have a half terabyte boot drive and a 1TB game library drive which already has 672 GB of games on it. So if I want a drive that can actually fit my ambitious library on it, I could do with the 2TB version of the same drive for $44 more. It's also on a steeper discount, saving you $66 versus the $14 you're saving on the 1TB.
Price change: ➖
WD Black SN850X | 2 TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7,300 MB/s read | 6,600 MB/s write | $214.99 Newegg $124.99
The 2TB version of our favorite SSD is on steeper sale than the 1TB version this Black Friday and with the same great performance makes for a longer term investment in never having to make hard decisions about uninstalling your favorite games.
Price check: $137.79 at Amazon | Best Buy $129.99View Deal
Even after I buy myself a new drive and spend a day waiting for all these games to install, am I even going to have time to crack into all of them over the short holiday break? Who died and made you the responsible one? My delusions will last as long as the discounts do.
