The main things to watch out for are the same for Black Friday SSD deals as with any other technology bargain hunting you do around this November period. Go in there with an idea of what you want, and above all, what you need. It’s easy to get carried away at this time of year, but if you have a notion of how much you want to spend and what sort of SSD you’re after, you’ll be in good stead.
Capacity is a good starting point, and at the moment, we’re looking at some excellent 1TB offers, but a 512GB SSD will still afford you a lot of speed storage for a boot drive, with enough space for your most regularly played games. I mean, they’re not all Call of Duty, right?
Then think about the interface. Chances are, if you’re rocking a PC of the last five years, you’ll have an M.2 slot in your motherboard with NVMe support. However, it’s worth digging into the specifics of your motherboard to make sure that it can definitely support booting from such drives as not all can. Check out the manufacturer’s pages and maybe forums too.
If you’re considering making the switch to an AMD Zen 2 or Zen 3 processor and X570 or B550 chipsets, then there you also have a decision to make regarding PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The same’s true if you pick up an Intel Rocket Lake CPU with a Z590 motherboard. PCIe 4.0 is the newer standard, with the higher bandwidth, but is backward compatible with older boards. That means you can buy the latest SSDs now, and they’ll still be lightning-fast in your existing setup, just not to the full extent you’ll see when you do make the upgrade.
That said, PCIe 3.0 drives are still incredibly speedy compared to anything that has come before, so you’ll be in a great place with any high-performance NVMe SSD purchase.
There are some things to look out for, however. Some budget PCIe 3.0 drives only operate at x2 speed, which means they’re half as fast as the standard x4 NVMe SSDs. It’s also worth ensuring your M.2 SSD actually is an NVMe drive. There are some M.2 SSDs that still operate over the SATA interface and can only reach a maximum theoretical speed of 600MB/s, while the theoretical maximum of an x4 PCIe 3.0 interface is 4,000MB/s.
