Designed and marketed toward gamers of all kinds, the WD_Black SN850X currently ranks high on our list of the best SSDs and at the top of our list of best PS5 SSDs with the only serious complaint being the somewhat high price. But NAND prices are falling, and it’s Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend, with the result being some excellent Cyber Monday SSD deals. The WD Store now has the SN850X 2TB for $169 (opens in new tab) without a heatsink and $179 with a heatsink (opens in new tab), which you need for PS5 use. That’s a massive 41% discount form its original launch price! The 1TB and 4TB models are also on sale at a steep discount.
Whichever model you choose, you’ll still get the same great performance. Be sure to pick the model with heatsink (which is $10 more than the base model in every case), if you plan to use the drive in a PS5.
We tested the reviewed the WD_Black SN850X back in August when it first launched and it delivered excellent results, topping some of the charts and generally placing in the upper echelon of high-end SSDs. Our biggest complaint was with the high pricing and we weren’t overly impressed with the optional Game Mode 2.0 feature, which helps optimize performance while playing. Here’s a quick look at the performance of the 2TB model:
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With the current sale, what was once an extremely fast but expensive SSD now rates as one of the best overall values while still maintaining its high performance. With bloating game install sizes and dropping NAND prices, now is as good a time as we’re likely to get for upgrading your PC storage.
There aren’t that many 4TB M.2 SSDs around to begin with, and prices on the faster PCIe 4.0 variants have traditionally been in the $600 range. $379 is still expensive, now doubt, but if you’re looking at an RTX 4090 or RTX 4080 and a Core i9-13900K or Ryzen 9 7950X processor, why not go all the way with a capacious boot drive? But the 2TB drive remains the best deal overall, priced at $0.0845 per GB — an interesting change of pace, as the 1TB drive ends up with the highest per GB cost of $0.099.