I'll be honest—the post-Black Friday and Cyber Monday haze has not been kind to SSD pricing. Having finely combed through the best SSD deals for gaming today, I can confirm that surging memory prices have definitely not been kind to the asking price of the speediest drives. However, I have also stumbled across a few unsung SSD heroes.
To put that into perspective, the same drive with the same capacity sails past the $200 mark at Amazon, Newegg, and even Best Buy. In other words, getting one of the best SSD for gaming for much less from Walmart is a steal.
Now, to be clear, we rate the high-capacity, 8 TB version of the WD Black SN850X specifically in our current guide, but it was our top overall pick for a long time before the new SN7100 launched. Jeremy highly rated the 1 TB version in his WD Black SN850X review, and it remains a great drive today. Regardless of capacity, this is an excellent choice of PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming—besides, picking up multiple, lower capacity drives carries less of a risk of significant data loss than relying only on one beefy 8 TB drive.
But let's get into specifics. The 2 TB WD Black SN850X offers an advertised read and write speeds of 7,300 MB/s. It's worth noting our testing found both the 1 TB and 8 TB enjoyed peak sequential write speeds a little slower than that advertised figure, reaching 5,940 MB/s and 6,590 MB/s respectively. That will still be plenty fast for most of your games though.
Also worth noting is that the deal here only applies to the heatsink-less version. You may be forgiven for thinking that means this SSD will get toasty without the bumpy, funky heat-spreader, but our reviews of the different capacity models found the SN850X to be a surprisingly cool customer. In his review of the 1TB model specifically, Jeremy even says, "For most applications, we’d probably go for the cheaper bare drive rather than this more expensive model with its heat spreader. The revised SN850X is inherently a cooler-running thing, after all."
Now, best of all, if you pick one of these up right now, there's a good chance it'll arrive before Christmas. You know, just in case there's a very unsubtle gamer in your life rapidly running out of storage space that you haven't yet bought a Christmas gift for…Mum.
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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