There’s no need to put off that SSD upgrade any longer, as this Black Friday gaming SSD deal enables you to pick up our favorite drive for the bargain price of just $79.99 / £69.95, giving you some more space for game installs and probably speeding up your storage in the process. Yes, the WD Black SN850X is currently on offer, enabling you to save around 15% over the usual price.
As we found in our WD Black SN850X review, this drive’s balance of speed for the price is fantastic, earning it the top spot on our guide to the best gaming SSD. Using the 4x PCIe 4.0 interface, this WD drive isn’t as fast as the very latest PCIe 5.0 SSDs, but it’s plenty quick enough for gaming, and it has an extra trick up its sleeve when it comes to the latter as well.
This is all thanks to the WD Black SN850X’s Game Mode, which had a very real impact on game load times in our tests, with the SN850X running at 965MB/s in our Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 load time test, compared to just 739MB/s for the Samsung 990 Pro. We were also really impressed by the SN850X’s top sequential read speed of 6,973MB/s in our tests, beating the Samsung 980 Pro, and not being far off the Samsung 990 Pro.
This drive does get hot when it’s running at full load, so we recommend either fitting it with a heatsink from your motherboard or buying the version with the heatsink (pictured above). The latter is also in Amazon’s Black Friday deals right now, priced at $89.99, and it keeps the drive cool under pressure, while also even having a small RGB LED embedded in it.
If you need even more than 1TB, then don’t worry, as the 2TB heatsink version of this drive is also on offer right now for just $133.99. To pick up the 1TB WD Black SN850X for $79.99, click on this link here, or on this link to grab the heatsink version for $89.99. Alternatively, you can pick up the discounted 2TB drive from this link here
Bear in mind that you’ll need a 4x PCIe 4.0 slot free on your motherboard to run this drive at full speed. It will also work in a PCIe 5.0 slot, but it won’t be any faster than in a PCIe 4.0 one. Likewise, it will also function in a PCIe 3.0 slot, but it will only run at about half its full speed.
If you’ve never upgraded an M.2 SSD before, check out our guide on how to install an SSD, where we take you through the whole process step by step. If you’re looking for more offers, you can also read our Black Friday deals hub, where we take you through all the best PC tech bargains we’ve found.