Best Black Friday SSD and storage deals: Nov 23

In a word, yes. You can save a significant amount of money (sometimes hundreds of dollars on a high capacity drive) during the big Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale period. The trick is to know what’s a good deal, and what’s not. That’s where we come in: We’ve scoured reputable online retailers, looking for demonstrably good hardware at legitimately good discounts.

Prices depend on the usual street or retail price of the SSD model—so type of drive, its capacity, and its speed are all factors. Generally, expect to pay about $45 to $50 for a good 1TB SATA or NVMe Gen 3 drive, and $75 to $80 for a 1TB NVMe Gen 4 drive. But the easier guideline to just look for discounts of at least 20 percent or more, especially if you’re looking for high-capacity hard disk drives.

Nope! Unlike other products, storage vendors don’t produce special models for sale periods like Black Friday/Cyber Monday. These are the same models you’d find on a retail shelf or available on a website throughout the rest of the year.

The best Black Friday deals drop prices on SSDs and HDDs from reliable brands. A good discount starts around 15 to 20 percent—and a great deal will be 30 percent or more. Typically, the bigger bargains are higher-capacity SSDs (4TB or higher).

For the specific brands to watch, stick with known names like Samsung, Crucial, Corsair, SK Hynix, Western Digital, Kingston, and Sabrent. Solidigm, TeamGroup, and PNY are also options. The further afield you go, the more likely you’ll end up with underperforming (aka slow) drives.

Pay attention to the model, as well. You can often find multiple drives from a single vendor on sale. The usual sweet spots are discounts on high-performing drives rarely on sale and steep price cuts on budget models. This year we’re finally seeing sizable reductions on high-capacity drives (4TB and up), too.

This is the big question. If you’re on a budget, and have a laptop or a PC that has space for a 2.5-inch drive, a humble SATA SSD will already feel like a lightning-fast upgrade from a spinning-platter (HDD) boot drive. (SATA SSDs also exist in the gumstick M.2 size, but this year’s best sales for that form factor are the faster NVMe SSDs.)

For those trying to decide between NVMe Gen 3 and NVMe Gen 4 drives, most people can buy a Gen 3 drive with a light heart. Unless you’re doing frequent large file transfers (think many GB at a time), you’ll get a notable boost in performance over a SATA drive without spending a ton of extra cash. If you’re building a system or buying for the very long haul, though, a Gen 4 drive is a good investment. File sizes will only climb over time for game installs, videos, and photos. If you’re in need of absolute blistering speeds for heavy workloads and transfers, then an NVMe Gen 5 drive may be best for you. But that won’t be most people.

Still having trouble deciding? You can check out our guide on choosing an SSD for more details about each type of solid-state drive.

PCWorld tests and reviews new SSDs every month, so if you’re looking to see what we recommend without regard to deal prices, check our rankings of the best SSDs of 2023. But it’s not an either/or situation: Some of our top picks are on sale right now!