The best PCIe 5.0 SSD deals this Black Friday
- Crucial T705 | 1 TB | $155
- Crucial T705 | 2 TB | $160 (save $40)
If you're looking for a speedy SSD, then you really want a drive that comes with a PCIe 5.0 interface. Unfortunately, these drives represent the bleeding edge of consumer-grade storage media and often come with a price to match. However, I've just found a Black Friday deal that may well justify the upgrade.
- We're curating all the Black Friday PC gaming deals right here
I filled up the 1 TB SSD in my prebuilt machine with a truly alarming swiftness, so picking up another 1 TB or even pushing the boat out with an additional 2 TB drive would give my games room to breathe. Well, you can pick up the 2 TB version of the Crucial T705 for only $160—which is almost the same price as the 1 TB version.
Now, it's worth noting here that this deal only applies to heatsink-less versions of the drive. If you've not already had a chance to read Zak's Crucial T705 1 TB review, that means you'll get the most out of this deal if you already have a motherboard that has a decent slab of metal covering its M.2 slots.
The version that comes with a heatsink is not only more expensive, but the sink itself is not easily removable. Furthermore, it doesn't do a particularly good job at dissipating heat either, as Zak notes: "The T705 came in at 84°C at peak, utilizing that built-in heatsink. That is quite high." So, you really are best off grabbing the sink-less version and popping on your own preferred heatsink instead.
Toasty thermals aside, the Crucial T705 is definitely speedy. Zak breaks it down thus: "Latency is ridiculously low in 3DMark's storage benchmark, scoring a staggering 39 ns. At a guess, this is down to that single NAND package, which, although it may be detrimental when it comes to maxing out sequential speeds, actually reduces latency significantly, in turn bumping up random access times in certain applications."
And to be clear, those sequential read and write speeds leave little to be desired, reaching up to 13,600 MB/s and 10,200 MB/s, respectively. That means this PCIe 5.0 drive can more than handle whatever you throw at it, be it storing games, movies, and more, or the perhaps baffling choice to relegate it to being just a boot drive.
If you're torn on what storage capacity to get, though, bigger tends to be best. Zak explains, "If you're after those highest-rated 14 GB/s speeds, you're going to want to grab the 2 TB solutions and above; any lower than that, and the single NAND package is going to hold you back, being the bottleneck there, although the random 4K numbers are still pretty stellar, even with the singular package, making it a pretty solid pick for gamers."
👉Click here for all of Amazon's Black Friday SSD deals👈
1. Best overall:
WD_Black SN7100
2. Best budget:
Biwin Black Opal NV7400
3. Best PCIe 5.0:
WD_Black SN8100
4. Best budget PCIe 5.0:
Crucial P510
5. Best 4 TB:
TeamGroup MP44
6. Best 8 TB:
WD_Black SN850X
7. Best M.2 2230:
Lexar Play 2230
8. Best for PS5:
Silicon Power XS70
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