Black Friday SSD deals 2024

What does price change mean?

We’ve added a new “price change” qualifier to all our individual deals, making it easy to see whether a price has risen or lowered on an ongoing deal at a glance. It’s important to note that any deal in this guide (even if it’s slightly risen in price) is still one of our top picks, as we only show you deals that are the best price you can find on this product right now.

What should I look for in a Black Friday SSD deal?

It’s easy to get carried away at this time of year, but if you know 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. At the moment, we’re looking at some excellent 1 TB, 2 TB and 4 TB offers. A 512 GB SSD will still afford you a lot of speed storage for a boot drive, with enough space for a handful of games, depending on the size, but this capacity is very slim nowadays.

Then think about the interface. Chances are, if you’ve been rocking a PC for 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 ensure it can support booting from such drives as not all can. Check out the manufacturer’s pages and maybe forums too.

It’s also worth thinking about which version of the PCIe interface your storage slots operate on. On the AMD side, from the Ryzen 3000-series and up you should expect to have PCIe 4.0 slots on your motherboard, and from Intel’s 11th-Gen Rocket Lake chips the same should be true. PCIe 4.0 drives are the more mainstream option today, which are widely supported, whereas the faster PCIe 5.0 standard is only just entering the market. These are expensive and not necessarily worth it for gamers just yet.

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. These are pretty rare nowadays but it’s worth double checking. It’s also worth ensuring your M.2 SSD 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 600 MB/s, while even a PCIe 4.0 drive can hit over 7,000 MB/s.

Will prices drop any lower?

There are always reasons to hold off on making a new purchase whenever you are thinking about making one. Whether it’s the potential for a new generation of techie goodness on the horizon—either cutting prices on existing models or delivering tangible higher performance—or because there might be an imminent sale looming.

When picking out SSD deals we take all of this into consideration, and where we think prices on something might significantly drop on the big day itself we simply won’t recommend it. But all of the products here we either believe won’t significantly drop much further in terms of their pricing, or are just good deals that we wouldn’t hesitate recommending if you wanted to make a purchase today.