Why Cyber Monday Is Prime Time For SSD Upgrades
Cyber Monday is one of the best times of year to grab a fast SSD for your gaming PC, handheld, console, or laptop. Prices might not always hit historic lows, but with storage costs expected to creep up again, many of the current deals are likely the best you will see for a while.
If you are still loading games from a hard drive or squeezing Call of Duty, Baldur’s Gate 3 and your OS onto a tiny SSD, Cyber Monday is the perfect excuse to upgrade. A modern NVMe SSD does not just give you extra space. It means faster boot times, snappier Windows performance, and drastically shorter load times in games.
The deals highlighted across retailers like Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, B and H Photo, Walmart and others span everything from compact 2230 drives for handheld PCs and Steam Decks, to huge 8 TB monsters for massive Steam libraries, plus loads of external drives for fast portable storage.
How Much SSD Capacity Do You Really Need?
You will see deals from 512 GB all the way up to 8 TB, but not every size makes sense for gaming.
- Up to 512 GB: Fine only as a boot drive or secondary drive for documents and a few smaller games. Modern titles can chew through this space very quickly.
- 1 TB: The sensible minimum for a gaming PC in 2025. Enough for Windows plus a rotating selection of large AAA games and a good chunk of your backlog.
- 2 TB: The current sweet spot for many gamers. Plenty of room for your OS and a big library without constantly uninstalling games.
- 4 TB and up: Ideal if you have a huge Steam, Game Pass or Epic library and want everything installed at once. These drives cost more but are perfect for creators and heavy gamers.
For handhelds like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally, there are also 2230 form factor SSDs at 1 TB and 2 TB. These are smaller than standard M.2 drives but let you massively increase the storage and slightly boost performance over the stock drive.
Understanding SSD Types And Interfaces
Most of the hot Cyber Monday offers are NVMe SSDs that slot into an M.2 socket on your motherboard. A few older style SATA drives show up too, mainly as cheap options for basic storage.
Here is what matters for gaming.
- SATA SSDs: 2.5 inch or M.2 SATA drives are much faster than old hard drives but much slower than NVMe. Good for cheap extra space or non gaming storage, but not ideal for a main game drive today.
- NVMe over PCIe: This is what you want. These drives use PCI Express lanes and are labelled NVMe. They are available in PCIe 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 variants.
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PCIe 3.0 vs 4.0 vs 5.0:
- PCIe 3.0 drives are still fine for gaming and often very cheap, but slower on paper.
- PCIe 4.0 is the current mainstream choice. Many of the best gaming SSDs like WD Black SN850X or Samsung 990 Pro hit read speeds around 7 000 MB per second.
- PCIe 5.0 drives offer crazy sequential speeds above 10 000 MB per second, but they are expensive and the benefit for gaming is small right now.
The good news is that PCIe is backwards compatible. A PCIe 4.0 SSD will happily run in a PCIe 3.0 M.2 slot, just at 3.0 speeds. That means you can snag a quality PCIe 4.0 drive today and still benefit fully if you upgrade your CPU and motherboard later.
One small detail to watch: some very cheap PCIe 3.0 drives only use two PCIe lanes instead of four, which halves their potential bandwidth. If you see PCIe 3.0 x2 in the specs, expect notably lower performance than standard x4 drives.
What Makes A Good Cyber Monday SSD Deal For Gamers
With pages of specs and prices thrown at you, it is easy to get lost. Use these simple rules when you are scanning Cyber Monday SSD deals.
- Aim for at least 1 TB if you are upgrading your main gaming drive. 2 TB is ideal if the price is reasonable.
- Prioritise NVMe PCIe 4.0 unless you are severely budget limited or on very old hardware. They hit the best balance of cost, speed and future proofing.
- Check real world performance, not just peak numbers. Many drives advertise 7 000 plus MB per second, but reviews show big differences in sustained write speeds and random 4K performance, which affect game loading.
- Watch for DRAM less designs. Many budget drives skip DRAM cache to cut costs. They can still be decent for gaming and as boot drives, but premium models with DRAM cache tend to be more consistent, especially under heavy workloads.
- Look at price per gigabyte. A 2 TB drive might look expensive at first glance, but often works out cheaper per GB than the 1 TB model. Huge 4 TB and 8 TB drives can sometimes hit very attractive cost per GB if they are on a big discount.
- Consider heat and form factor. Some high performance PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 drives run hot and benefit from a motherboard heatsink or built in cooler. For handhelds and laptops you may want single sided drives without bulky heatsinks.
External SSDs are also a big part of the Cyber Monday action. They are ideal for taking your Steam folder between PCs, expanding console storage or carrying project files.
- USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives offer up to around 1 050 MB per second. Plenty fast for running games externally and way quicker than any hard drive.
- USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 and USB4 40 Gbps models can hit 2 000 to almost 4 000 MB per second, but only if your PC has matching ports. Always check your motherboard or laptop specs before paying for the fastest external drives.
- Rugged designs with drop protection and IP ratings are handy if you take your drives on the road or to LANs.
In the end, the best Cyber Monday SSD deal is the one that fits your system, gives you enough space for your current and future games, and hits a good balance between speed and price. If you focus on 1 TB or 2 TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 drives from reputable brands, you will almost certainly walk away with a big upgrade for your gaming rig.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/cyber-monday-ssd-deals/
